Content filtering

“ Any currently available filtering product that is reasonably effective in preventing users from accessing content within the filter's category definitions will necessarily block countless thousands of Web pages, the content of which does not match the filtering company's category definitions, much less the legal definitions of obscenity, child pornography, or harmful to minors. ”

“ Once a particular Web page or site is categorized, however, filtering companies generally do not re-review the contents of that page or site unless they receive a request to do so, even though the content on individual Web pages and sites changes frequently. ”

“ The inaccuracies that result from these limitations of filtering technology are quite substantial. At least tens of thousands of pages of the indexable Web are overblocked by each of the filtering programs evaluated by experts in this case, even when considered against the filtering companies' own category definitions. Many erroneously blocked pages contain content that is completely innocuous for both adults and minors, and that no rational person could conclude matches the filtering companies' category definitions, such as "pornography" or "sex." ”

“ To cope with the Web's extraordinary size, rate of growth, and rate of change, filtering companies that rely solely on human review to block access to material falling within their category definitions must use a variety of techniques that will necessarily introduce substantial amounts of overblocking. ”

“ To be sure, the quantitative estimates of the rates of overblocking apply only to those four commercially available filters analyzed by plaintiffs' and defendants' expert witnesses. Nonetheless, given the inherent limitations in the current state of the art of automated classification systems, and the limits of human review in relation to the size, rate of growth, and rate of change of the Web, there is a tradeoff between underblocking and overblocking that is inherent in any filtering technology, as our findings of fact have demonstrated. ”

“ A filter is an apparatus for separating from fluids the foreign substances mechanically intermixed with them and held in suspension. While this is all that most filters aim to accomplish, yet experiments show that a filtering material may be used which very markedly diminishes the foreign bodies usually held in solution in water, and also removes those held in suspension. ”

“ First, automated review processes, even those based on "artificial intelligence," are unable with any consistency to distinguish accurately material that falls within a category definition from material that does not. Moreover, human review of URLs is hampered by filtering companies' limited staff sizes, and by human error or misjudgment. In order to deal with the vast size of the Web and its rapid rates of growth and change, filtering companies engage in several practices that are necessary to reduce underblocking, but inevitably result in overblocking. ”

“ Secondly, in one (admittedly somewhat negative) reading of peer review, it is possible to see the filter-first method as a development entwined as much with economics as with quality. Historically, one of the key functions of the gatekeeper has been to reduce the quantity of permissible material; clearly, for economic reasons, not everything that is submitted can be published. This was not only an effort to avert what is now called ‘information overload’ and what are perceived as low standards, but also because each issue of a print journal or each book had a specified page budget. ”

“ To the extent that filtering software is effective in identifying URLs of Web pages containing obscenity or child pornography, libraries may use filtering software as a tool for identifying URLs in their Internet use logs that fall within these categories, without requiring patrons to use filtering software. ”

“ In providing its patrons with Internet access, a public library creates a forum for the facilitation of speech, almost none of which either the library's collection development staff or even the filtering companies have ever reviewed. Although filtering companies review a portion of the Web in classifying particular sites, the portion of the Web that the filtering companies actually review is quite small in relation to the Web as a whole. ”

“ While none of us, I would guess, want to go back a century and live without the extraordinary tools and communications delivery systems—off the grid as they say—we must acknowledge that the data smog requires some filtration. The best filter is going to be our own individual capacity to turn off and tune out occasionally, but we need as well as information filters such as search engines, libraries, museums, and archives. ”

“ Not all changes will affect you.
What's new?
“New Filters for Edit Review” beta released: As of May 9, the New Filters for Edit Review beta has been released to all wikis. The beta lets users review edits on Recent Changes using an easier and more powerful interface and many new tools, including user-defined highlighting and, on some wikis, predictive filters powered by ORES, a machine-learning program. You must opt in to the beta to try it out. More features coming soon: The New Filters are still very much in development. ”

“ A cool tool for saving filter settings; a “Watchlisted pages” filter; a “Flagged Revisions” filter (for some wikis only) ; a “Last revision” filter. Tell us your ideas—but don’t wait: The team is focused right now in making changes to the New Filters beta. But in a few months, we’ll be moving on to other projects. So now is the time to give the new tools a try and then tell us what you think. What works well? What could make things better for you? ”

“ The majority’s opinion begins its analysis by observing, correctly in my view, that “ [i] t is useful to analyze separately distinct functions of the secondary use (i.e., the use by TVEyes of Fox’s copyrighted material) , considering whether each independent function is a fair use.” [13] It then turns to the distinction between the Search function and the Watch function. The Search function “allows clients to identify videos that contain keywords of interest” [14] – it “enables users to isolate, from an ocean of programming, material that is responsive to their interests.” ”

“ So when we were thinking about how to architect Creative Commons, this was the core problem that we had to struggle with, and our solution was to say: “We should recognize there are basically three different audiences that we’re speaking to.” One audience is the people who are not lawyers, and so that’s why we have the commons deed that tries to express the freedoms associated with the content. ”

“ The primary limitations on filtering companies' ability to harvest Web pages for review is that a substantial majority of pages on the Web are not indexable using the spidering technology that Web search engines use, and that together, search engines have indexed only around half of the Web pages that are theoretically indexable. The fast rate of growth in the number of Web pages also limits filtering companies' ability to harvest pages for review. These shortcomings necessarily result in significant underblocking. ”

“ Being copyright conscious in today’s online environment can be challenging when public domain works are often hard to find, licensing filters are not always accurate, works are not properly tagged with license in-formation, stock photos cost money and lack diversity, and tracking down the creator to ask permission to use a work seems like a detective’s task. To ease the dilemma of whether one can use something found on the Internet, Waxer created a simple flow chart called “Can I Use It?” ”

“ The solution of Users (anyone, 9-90) creating 'portals' means some has to devise it, create it, check it, maintain it, argue about it, arrange it, categorise it, and inevitably conflict with some other notional arrangement. Creating new content is problematic, whether it is bias or benign, and pointless when users can already create their own 'pages' with a search.
Limiting the 'page' of search results by author, or any authority, would be a crucial feature.The alternative is to create wikipedia-lite in the portal namespace, not simple and a tangent to the purpose of the site. ”

“ And I would frankly be perfectly comfortable giving them editing rights too, if possibly accompanied with an admonition to not use it lightly. Very few of our filters actually take actions like blocking users (which is a separate permission in any case) or disallow edits: most of them just tag various stuff we want to track. ”

“ To organize and present all those advertisements and pieces of content, defendants have developed “recommendation” algorithms that automatically match advertisements and content with each user; the algorithms generate those outputs based on a wide range of information about the user, the advertisement, and the content being viewed. So, for example, a person who watches cooking shows on YouTube is more likely to see cooking-based videos and advertisements for cookbooks, whereas someone who likes to watch professorial lectures might see collegiate debates and advertisements for TED Talks. ”

“ But people have understood the importance of media and, and media and technology, and ordinary people are using quite basic instruments like, cameras. They're also specialized people who make their living out of making, like wedding videos. So they have the technical skills that people are using these skills to put up content on the web, which is allowing us to harness the language, and they're doing it unconsciously in ways that are pleasurable and serve them. ”

“ But I want to mention a couple of things that I think are worth considering in this discussion. Most of the time, a mainspace "work" that is only a table of contents, but which has none of the actual content, and is not actively being worked on, can be (and should be) deleted as No meaningful content or history under our deletion policy. A mainspace work that has only a little bit of content, but that content is a work unto itself within the scope of Wikisourse, should be kept. Most periodicals are like this. ”

“ As ‘semantic publishing’ and the tools and services that enable researchers and others automatically to organise and manipulate content develop further and become more widely available, it will become more important to ensure that users have the rights to exploit these new technologies and services. ”

“ Waxer discussed the precautions of using searchable image collection websites, stating that many photo collections have terms and conditions that do not encourage users to attribute the use of a work to the original creator, and some will not even list the copyright information with the items in the collection. When image collection websites have licensing filters, the results may not always be accurate. For example, by using the advanced search feature on Flickr, a user-generated image collection website, users can search by license. ”

“ Material posted to the Internet typically serves a time-limited purpose and targets a distinct network of users, while its library held counterpart will document the site for a wide variety of patrons over time. A scholar perusing a collection of archived web pages on the Free Tibet movement, or examining the evolution of educational information on a communicable disease, seeks and encounters that material for a very different purpose than the creators originally intended. ”

“ The basic scenario is stewards can convert a local meta filter into a filter that can be applied xwiki to configured wikis, all hits are logged locally and centrally. The filters are generally set softer, though after extensive testing and continued spam they can be given a little more oomph. FWIW numbers of the filters that we have locally are replicas of what I have created at meta. AsI have a sort of vested interest that is as hard as I am going to push, though happy to answer questions if my explanation is considered too concise. ”

“ Good taste and bad co-exist; pornography resides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those of the most suave examples from art history. The Internet is the one and only uncensored place left on the earth. All these phenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change of the condition of human experience, and in the context of change from a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partial literacies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions of value and significance. ”

“ Readers can’t trust the information they’re being provided to make a content decision. A single opaque algorithm defines which readers are matched with which publishers. Publishers have no control over their own ad rates or profit margins. Regulators see the genuine short-term reader benefit but don’t realize the long-term harms that can arise. After Markets: Self-Driving News But wait, it gets worse. ”

“ Since all members contribute to the data collection in different ways and at different times, the result is an open corpus very unlike the typical ethnographic monograph or conventional linguistic collection of folk-stories that tend to be holistic if not in scope then at least with regard to the fact that they are presented as a book or a similarly bounded entity. Ideally, the new digital corpora are supposed to grow even after the funding period has ended as researchers add to it and work on it for their various projects, and to various degrees this ideal is in fact realised. ”

“ Although it in no way requires it, open access does offer a moment in which to reevaluate other publication practices, such as peer review. While I will leave a full discussion of these aspects until later, it is worth noting, at this point, that the value of discovery through a coherent list may be diminished through digital mechanisms. For instance, as full-text search and online ranking mechanisms mature, the community might be able to rate good material internally while burying the bad. ”