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Chrome, Firefox extension that blocks NSFW images using TensorFlow JS (github.com/nsfw-filter)
150 points by bishalb on Aug 23, 2020 | hide | past | favorite | 157 comments


> All the images remain hidden until they are found to be NSFW or not

The demo screenshot/page seems to only show NSFW images, so the demo doesn't convey how quickly this classifier can operate. The demo page should have some non-NSFW images to show off how quickly SFW images are revealed, since the default is to block all images.


We will change that. Seems like a good idea


I’ve jokingly / seriously been waiting for things like this. I’m the type to go overboard with filtering and mute lists on twitter, but images are harder to deal with. I did have a 60,000 line pastebin that was used in conjunction with a Chrome extension to block Wojack and Pepe memes on 4chan using md5 hashes, but something not rely on specific hashes is obviously superior.

One day someone will release the ‘detect and block anything resembling kpop’ extension for Twitter and I’ll be happy.


> block Wojack and Pepe memes on 4chan

What are you there for, then?


to collect dataset?


Wait, I'm still confused. Why have a nsfw filter for data collection if the subject is partially defined by its nsfw qualities?


touché


I expressed some interest at some point of hiding profiles which contained a certain phrase in their bio and got downvoted. Does anyone know of any extentions that can do this?


I would use this for sure. Certain phrases are great flags for me to know "I won't be interested in anything this person has to say."


Do you think the issue with hyperpartisanism is that people’s existing bubbles and filters just aren’t strong enough?


I don't know about all of that, but I do know I want to use twitter for tech and not politics.


I'd love a youtube comment filter that instantly removes anyone with a meme avatar or famous world leader avatar. I can skip the opinions of Hitler, pepe and JC Denton.


I am very interested in this wojak/pepe filtering thing, I think it's finally started to decrease but there was a solid 5 year gap where you really couldn't escape those dumb pictures

I started doing the same with md5 hash filtering but it was very slow going, an AI that can detect low quality posts and filter them out is the holy grail I guess


>One day someone will release the ‘detect and block anything resembling kpop’ extension for Twitter and I’ll be happy.

Not only kpop, but entire "fandoms" as a whole. When that software finally arrives, I want to be able to refer back to this comment and say I read it here first.


I want the same for ‘emotional hooks by PR’. It works so well on the internet that we get flooded with it.


From experience 99.9% of the time unless I visit a porn site purposely or some warez site by accident, or questionable reddit channels, I see no NSFW. However I do see some benefits if this was for kids.


Sound like you have ad-block or avoid sketchy (pirate) websites.


Adblock is a far simpler and probably more effective solution than this, with a host of other benefits such as speeding up websites, whereass presumably this extension will slow down the browsing experience quite a bit. Given that, the only reason I can see for using this is if adblock was not doing a good enough job alone.


A few years ago I was at work and was looking up something and the page I landed on had ads that featured a barely dressed lady in them. The funny thing is that I didn’t even notice the ad until one of my coworkers, who was passing by my desk stopped, chuckled and asked me if I was looking at ladies on the computer during working hours lol.

I guess I had developed a kind of builtin ad filter into my brain, from ignoring so many ads over the years.

Thankfully, my place of work had reasonable people working there. But I think if I worked somewhere more strict even that one ad might have prompted a conversation with HR. Nonetheless, I promptly installed an ad-blocker on the browser in case any ads would be shown in the future that would have been more explicit than the one that had been showing this time.


Preventing the last 0.1% could be meaningful though, depending on your environment.


Shameless plug - I've been working on something similiar, but with a different aim.

https://github.com/nmurray1984/porn-blocker-chrome-extension

I found that the hardest problem to solve was the prevanlence of false positives. Even if you have a low false positive rate, it's still very likely to have an image blocked regularly just due to volume.

For that reason, the focus of my plugin is - for users that are OK with it - contributing URLs that are not NSFW but have been blocked. The extension includes a right-click menu option to do so.


Assuming you meant some SFW images are mistakenly blocked, it is an easier situation than with true negative.

Once an image tested positive with your first model, you could run a second more CPU intensive model (but also more accurate) on it.


Assuming you have a notably more accurate algorithm. It's a difficult problem even with infinite computing power.


Great idea. MobileNetv2 is the model used currently due to it's small footprint (I used transfer learning on a dataset of NSFW and SFW images). A more robust model ran on all positives could improve performance overal.


This is great, except it'd be really, really great with some sort of placeholder image for the blocked images if possible.


We had that in the first version but we kind of removed it. We will try to add one option for that.


Why would I care about not seeing NSFW images?

What I really do care about is not seeing worthless clickbait. That makes me endlessly angry. Could you build a filter like that on top of this?


Uh, because I'm at work and wouldn't mind an additional layer of protection.

Because I live stream and people try to trick me into viewing NSFW content on stream.

Is this really a question?


> Why would I care about not seeing NSFW images?

The issue with NSFW images is not you seeing it on your own computer, it is other people seeing it on your computer (e.g. while walking by or for some other reason).


Hey, Long here, I meant to keep this private for a while, but I’m building this thing. getpuritan dot com for now. My prototype is a chrome extension that blocks clickbait using a ML model that placed top 3 in a clickbait prediction competition, but it’s really rough. My email is longintuition at protonmail if you’d like to help me test—can also send a video so you can see how it works


This extension reminded me of that Black Mirror episode where a mother filtered what her daughter could see and hear.

Great work with TensorFlow by the way, can't wait to see this technology maturing over the years.


Missed opportunity - where is the browser extension that makes all of the images NSFW?

You leave your laptop unlocked and suddenly it looks like the nude bomb went off (https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0081249/).


I've been wanting for something like this ever since we by accident looked at our 9 year old daughter's screen. She likes to draw characters from her favorite cartoon and searches for images on the web. Apparently there's a porn actress with the same name as one of the characters... DDG was set to "strict", so no full nudity or any explicit act, but still very NSFW.


DDG is kind of fascinating. Ever since I switched to DDG as my main search engine, I feel like the internet is 90% porn. Although that's probably not far off, I'd prefer seeing relevant search results instead.


Far from that bad IMHO, but it has a weird tendency to surface NSFW results, yes.


Its not that bad with the regular search results. Sometimes porn makes it to the first result page, usually its on the second or later.

The real problem is when searching for images. I recently had to search for a lot of images and for basically any search term I entered DDG was able to find porn. Ultimately, this made me switch back to Google since constantly having to risk showing NSFW results on your workplace in an open plan office isn't exactly a great experience.

I'm now using Google at work, Ecosia on my mobile phone and DDG/Google on my PC/Mac.


yeah, I think that is because Bing provides (some/a lot/all?) of their image results and Bing seems to have tried to maximize their porn results.

Both of those ideas are heresay/rumor.


I want this but for ads.


Adblock extensions already exist, like uBlock origin


Yes, but do they treat the content as an image? Or do they merely hope that the content is identifiable as an ad through other means?


Does the Tensorflow model run in JS? How fast is that?

Would it be feasible to run the model in wasm or in the GPU?


I can't speak for this specific model/extension, but "most" neural networks aren't that big at the end of the day, and you are just a few matrix dot products away from getting your classification (of course, I'm drastically simplifying).

Its the training that takes forever, due to the fact all those numbers need tweaking. However one you have the model, classifying is pretty fast.


Are there tools to visualise trained model,?



Something to visualise the models, the one in this link

https://github.com/nsfw-filter/nsfw-filter/tree/master/dist/...



This is amazing. Thanks for sharing! Didn't know about netron.


> Wait, it's all a DAG?

>> Always has been.


The brain is a heavily cyclic graph. We're not there yet ;)


I just installed this, and my whole browser grinds to a halt when I load a page...


That should not happen! Could you tell us about the issue? https://github.com/nsfw-filter/nsfw-filter/issues


Yes, tensorflow model can run on JS. I did that when developing a Deep Learning product, PredictSalary (https://predictsalary.com). The problem is not the model, but the TensorflowJS library (using Node) is big (8MB) after webpack-ing it (even after using compressing flag).

So I decided to move the inference to the server.

It's fast but I didn't toy with GPU setting when running Tensorflow model on JS.


So we use MobileNet V2 model. It is relatively light weight and can run fast on the browser itself


disappointed this is not called "hotdog / not hotdog"


This would be too late in my workplace, as they'd be logged that I downloaded the images. That I didn't see them in my browser would be irrelevant.


Yeah, fixing that would require breaking "The extension runs completely on your browser. i.e No user data is being sent to a server for processing." as image requests would have to be hashed, checked on a server and only allowed depending on the response.

So seems this extension is not really for your use case but for others.


I'm curious how workplaces do this. Does they have a root cert installed so they can MITM SSL traffic?


Yes exactly. And, ironically, many of these solutions can make you less safe; at one of my former employers we had something like this, but the problem is that since you're getting a cert from the MITM server, you're not able to inspect the cert from the real server, and at least in the case of the Cisco product we were using, the MITM server wouldn't bother to inspect it either; expired certs, certs with the wrong CN, self signed cert, didn't matter - the MITM server would ignore the problem and happily replace the cert with a valid one signed by the company CA.


That is more often a configuration issue than a technology issue. MITM proxies can be configured to reset connections to sites with invalid/expired certificates.


Every place I ever worked did exactly this. They use a protocol called WCCP which is essentially source routing, so if you're going to the internet on certain ports it routes you to a proxy server instead of whichever router it normally would.

Most companies big enough to do this already have their own internal CA installed on all the machines, for internal sites, so they use that same CA to sign the mitm cert. With so many sites using HSTS it can be annoying if you access a site while off the network.

As far as them knowing the content of a particular image they would need to have some kind of machine learning like this extension.


You could still run your own layer of encryption through that pipe though.


Presumably that is against policy and would get you fired?


Basically yes.


I don't think it's irrelevant. Having a NSFW pop up in the middle of a meeting and your access logged is much worse than just your access being logged.


It would be a nice feature for this extention to collect the URLs of detected porn images and report their hashes back, so they could be integrated into the extention itself.


true, the client still downloads the image so you'd still violate a work related policy... This plugin would have to operate as a proxy and filter the actual images that are NSFW so your client never downloads the actual image.


I was qurious about the classifier, and as expected it appears to be based on crawling to get the unsafe images - I doubt it's quite in compliance with neither copyright or gdpr..

The classifier lib:

https://github.com/alex000kim/nsfw_data_scraper

Announcement points to this data source (while the readme hints at a "premium" classifier):

https://github.com/infinitered/nsfwjs


Anyone know of a tool which can process videos (movies) and black/blur out nude scenes and make the film "family friendly"? The processing doesn't have to be realtime...

Just to expand: there are many excellent films which are not "family friendly" only because of 1 or 2 nude scenes which aren't even germane to the overall plot in many cases. I often wished there was a tool or SaaS that could detect such scenes and cut or blur them out. Would save a lot of manual processing.


There is a company that was trying to work in this space called VidAngel. https://www.vidangel.com/ I used to use them quite a lot and then they got sued by everyone and now I’m not sure what they are up too. It’s unclear if a company has the right to offer others content in a modified form - ie filtering out unacceptable content.

My favorite thing is that they had a JarJar filter for the Star Wars prequels.


They do on the fly skipping in streaming services. Rather than reselling modified content, they’re skipping time codes.


This must have been their pivot after getting sued. They used to rent filtered movies for $1.


Yeah, VidAngel is pretty much non-usable now because of the lawsuit(s)


For non-stream media (iso,dvds), skip files can work. These files allow you to define frames or seconds to skip or mute. For example mplayer has edl (edit decision list). http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/edl.html

Crowdsourcing such metadata would be a good start, although it can be subjective.

If you find out a better way for streaming media, please share.


Wouldn't make sense to remove the entire scene? Doing the Japanese style pixalation/censorship won't help IMO when you watch some movie with your kid and people start moaning. If the movie includes sex and nudity it probably includes some similar adult language so a tool that works in real time that only is trained on porn will be probably terrible and a waste of time though some "entrepreneur" would probably try to sell you such a tool (I mean it is just gluing shit togheter like most tools this days)


SaaS tool that does that: https://sightengine.com

Will flag sections of the video with explicit / suggestive / partial nudity


CleanFlix[1] did something like that, but was shut down by movie studios.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CleanFlicks

Vid Angel took a different approach, allowing you to fast forward over parts, and appears to still be operating: https://www.vidangel.com/


There is or used to be a start that addressed this market.

They had an ever expanding catalog of films they had processed to avoid any nudity or bad language. I think they cut those parts out entirety.

Here I found it.

They got sued out of existence apparently by the movies studios but was recreated and they now somehow do it with streaming content from Netflix or HBO.

I dont know how they do that but I figure they will be sued again.

I am not endorsing the company. I have never used it and never will but it is out there.

https://www.vidangel.com/


I'm going to be a little hypocritical here since I hate when I ask for help on the internet and people tell me instead to not want to do that thing... but:

Surely a much easier thing to do would be to simply stop being offended by the human body? Just watch the movies anyway. Your kids won't explode if they see a boob.

This reminds me of when I went thru all different low calorie sweeteners to put in coffee until I realized this is a problem I created myself and coffee is actually better if I just get used to having it plain.


You could use ffmpeg to delete the scenes containing violence/sex, but you'll have to manually find the timestamps yourself.


Chopping out scenes with swearing and sex and violence won’t make an adult story suitable for children.

There’s a whole genre of family friendly films, those will serve you better than trying to hack up stories for full adults.


Or even better, ads! Just show a nice landscape instead.


Is there a need? I feel like if you are old enough to watch a movie for adults, you are more than old enough to know about sex. But anyway, when was the last time you saw an erect penis in a movie you wanted to watch in a family setting?


If people want to use it then there is a need. You can't just tell people to stop having sensibilities


If you want to make videos family friendly, it's probably better to aim for removing violence than nudity, as one is clearly worse for the psych than the other.

Expansion: how are nude scenes not family friendly? Not trying to start any flame wars here, just trying to understand how one or two scenes with nudity suddenly means the video is not family friendly? We all go through life seeing nudity, so should be fine. Violence however is something we both strive and should avoid as much as possible.


> Expansion: how are nude scenes not family friendly?

The answer is "American Prudery".


See also American TV where you can show pretty extreme violence but not swear.


Gore-filled cartoons censoring/hiding the female nipple always gets me.



No, not really. Most people don't want to watch graphic sex scenes with their parents. It's not a "muh America" issue.


> Most people don't want to watch graphic sex scenes with their parents.

Teenagers don't, obviously. But when you are 30+ and you are watching a movie with your father or mother - none of you is embarrassed by it typically. Exactly because for grown-ups it's just sex.

And anyway - how many movies you can name with graphic sex scenes that are now porno? I can think of barely 2 or 3 maybe


Why not both? You could also argue that repeatedly seeing the most beautiful actors in the business nude, can hurt a teenager self image pretty badly, or that learning about sex from movies is probably not the best idea.


IMHO it’s not sex that’s the real problem for teenagers, but rather extreme sexualisation. And that doesn’t require nudity.


Yes, I agree, nudity is not always over sexualized, and I too, recognize the problem is sexualization.


Surely it's not that hard to understand that for religious, cultural or other reasons some people and/or members of their family may feel uncomfortable seeing nudity.


It doesn't make that viewpoint any less bizarre when our media is filled with people murdering each other on pretty much hourly basis. And it doesn't make a viewpoint that allows killing over depicting our bodies any less worth challenging.


Yeah, as far as I know, no religions or cultures forbid people to be naked or see other naked people. What other reasons are you referring to here?

It is indeed hard for me to understand how someone can feel uncomfortable seeing nudity, as it's everywhere in life and always has been.


You're not very familiar with other religions, then. I was raised in a religious environment that absolutely forbade people to see members of the opposite sex naked except in very specific scenarios (ie married couples, doctors treating patients, and that's about it).

This was one of the stated reasons why we couldn't watch TV or movies that weren't strictly vetted first.


Religions or cultures don't forbid this in general, but some do for purposes outside of procreation. It's really not "everywhere in life" for most people.


Nudity isn't "everywhere in life", so what is the point of this, since it's not to start a flame war?


I take a shower in the morning, nude. I go to the beach, there is nude people. I go to the gym and after taking a shower, nude people. I look at Instagram/Facebook/Any social media, there will be almost nude people, same with ads all over the place. Sometimes I sleep naked too. If you have a family, there is plenty of nudity and can happen at any point. Anyone who raised a child will give you an idea of how much nudity there really is in life.


That's not everywhere, it's two examples. Beaches and communal showers.

"Almost nude" simply means not nude, and personal, private nudity is obviously different from seeing other people nude.

Even if someone doesn't mind seeing naked people in the situations you describe, it still doesn't follow they should therefore be okay with nudity on screen in front of their family.


That's like saying you are always nude under your clothes so nudity isn't a problem. Nudity in movies is like softcore porn and they often come with bed scenes. Of course if your family is just you and your wife it's fine but I don't think any sane person would consider that ok for kids.


Why not? I’d definitely be more ok with a soft core scene than some brutal violence. Sex is normal/good part of life. One should educate kids about sex (and when it is appropriate) rather than pretend it literally doesn’t exist.


I would say keep kids away from both. Sex isn't something that needs to be taught, your kids will figure it out when they are ready and old enough.


Yes and no. Teens/young adults will have sex whether you accepts it or not. However, how they do it and how they feel about it definitely depends on education.

1. Sex safety ed needs to be taught, otherwise you get STDs and pregnancies. A couple of hour lecture in school is not enough. Safe sex practices is something that has to be reinforced and encouraged.

2. Respect of consent (and situations where consent cannot happen no matter what either party says) and understanding how to properly express yourself to the opposite sex is extremely important. Our society is full of people who do not treat the opposite gender fairly and do not understand the importance of enthusiastic consent in intimacy.

3. Normalizing sex positive attitude. Many people feel shame from sex/shame others for sexual behavior/repress their own natural desires/etc, this needs to be counterbalanced, especially in a puritanically perverted society like the US.


Reading the thread, it seems to be trying to explain the double standard with violence.


What Kind of Religion would find the depiction of violence and death fine, and the creation of life / nudity “uncomfortable“?


I mean... not to be banal, but... most of them?

Certainly all the abrahamic ones are fine with detailed descriptions of violence (have you read the Old Testament).


Most of religions forbid people to be naked / see other people naked? Please, list some of them, as I'm having a hard time finding which ones do this.


The Catholic Church insists on modesty, for example. You won't find an outright ban on nudity, because what is considered modest can change depending on culture. However, if you are trying to remain chaste by avoiding pre-marital sex & masturbation, it is not difficult to see how sexually explicit images make that difficult. In fact, pornography is specifically singled out as a crime against chastity.

> 2523 There is a modesty of the feelings as well as of the body. It protests, for example, against the voyeuristic explorations of the human body in certain advertisements, or against the solicitations of certain media that go too far in the exhibition of intimate things. Modesty inspires a way of life which makes it possible to resist the allurements of fashion and the pressures of prevailing ideologies.

> 2524 The forms taken by modesty vary from one culture to another. Everywhere, however, modesty exists as an intuition of the spiritual dignity proper to man. It is born with the awakening consciousness of being a subject. Teaching modesty to children and adolescents means awakening in them respect for the human person. [1]

> 2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world. It is a grave offense. Civil authorities should prevent the production and distribution of pornographic materials. [2]

[1]: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2... [2]: http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2...


You are conflating nudity and porn when they are two different things, and as far as nudity is concerned, focusing only on whether it is okay according to Christianity to be naked, rather than the other question more relevant to this story, which is whether it is okay according to Christianity to see someone else (who may or may not be Christian themself) be naked.


No, I didn't conflate anything. My post specifically covered that pornography is banned, while nudity may be permissible if it does not offend modesty.


The question you responded to was:

> Most of religions forbid people to be naked / see other people naked? Please, list some of them, as I'm having a hard time finding which ones do this.

You decided to respond with a point about pornography. Either you conflated nudity and pornography, or you responded with something unrelated to the question. I assumed the former as that seemed to me to be the more charitable explanation, but if the latter was the case instead, I apologise for the incorrect assumption. Instead, let me ask you: why did you feel it relevant to bring up pornography in response to that question?


The bulk of his reply was not about pornography. He specifically stated the Catholic Church has no outright ban on nudity, but quoted two paragraphs from the Vatican about "resist[ing] the allurements" of "voyeuristic explorations of the human body" in advertising or other media that "go too far in the exhibition of intimate things".

If advertising material qualifies, nudity in films qualifies.


For all practical purposes, Catholicism is an example of a religion that forbids nudity. Depictions of nudity that the church would find acceptable, online or in popular media, are rare enough that a concerned Catholic would be justified in avoiding all nudity out of caution.


From my (limited) understanding of Genesis, I assumed nudity was thought to be fine, at least in the beginning. It was only after eating the forbidden fruit did Adam and Eve clothe themselves, presumably out of some sort of shame or "decency."

I wouldn't be surprised if there are later passages condemning it, but I personally prefer the interpretation that it's not religion which makes nudity uncomfortable, but mankind and their flaws.


These people need to follow rest of civilization and educate themselves.


Lots of nudity in film is of a sexual nature. Uncontrolled exposure to fictional depictions of sex could create unhealthy understanding of sex in children that parents want to avoid. Hence not family friendly. I'm not saying most in film violence is either, but that's the reason.

One film I think of in this regard is Schindler's List. I've seen both the original and the TV edit that Spielberg made to broadcast for teenagers to see. The primary edits I noticed were sex scenes and post-sex nudity. Those scenes weren't gratuitous(they showed something about the characters) or anything, but were edited(either cut or blacked out part of the frame). BUT there was still lots of nudity in the edited film. This was nudity of a different nature. People forced to strip down and paraded in the open for inspection.

Sometimes parents just want to take the easy path and consider all nudity as out of bounds for their kids. I think that's fine.


I would generally put Schindlers List onto the "not-so-family-friendly"-list. It’s educational I guess but I wouldn’t want to show it to anyone below 16. And after that the nudity should be fine.


FWIW, my local secondary school here in the US has no issues showing Schindlers List to students in class. But this attitude isn’t something that would extend to a movie with nudity of a sexual or casual nature.


> Sometimes parents just want to take the easy path and consider all nudity as out of bounds for their kids.

Sometimes parents consider vaccinations to be out of bounds for their kids, too.


That's starting from the assumption you are doing this to engineer your children ands psychology.

Actually I think a lot of people find it awkward to watch graphic sex scenes and extended nudity with their family. As a grown up, the I feel awkward watching parts of game of thrones with my parents.

That's a shame because I would like to watch this show with them. Lately a lot of major TV shows seem to aim to include one nude scene per episode - I guess the money people think that's what sells...

I can understand why some people might find violence equally difficult, but where it features it tends to be much more tied to the plot.


Right, but doesn’t this awkwardness come from you growing up in a culture (I assume U.S.) where depictions of nudity are taboo?

If this taboo wouldn’t have existed for you as a kid I’m not so sure the awkwardness would exist for you as an adult. As a sample size of 1, coming from a country where there is much less of a taboo I feel very differently on this topic.


We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24251297.


Because it's awkward getting sexually aroused in front of family members?


Now just make a version that whites-out NSFW text in e-books and market it to Utahns as a way to read PG-13 versions of Game of Thrones books and you'll be rich.

However, you'll probably also be sued into oblivion by angry authors/publishers who don't like people modifying what they read in any way.


I know that’s tongue in cheek, but I’d really appreciate having a NSFW text filter.

Some of my CX team is getting harassed by trolls who send profane messages and racial slurs through the Zendesk Chat interface. Zendesk does not have a way to filter out profanity (for Chat at least; there are options for emails or tickets).

I’ve found simple client side extensions that can censor words, but a better approach would use NLP to grasp the context.

“I hope you die” contains the same words as “My <product> got wet, I hope it didn’t die”, but with vastly different intention.


Google Jigsaw might have what you are looking for, under the "Harassment" headline [1]. Note however both Google (Alphabet, really) and the tool specifically, were accused of various forms of bias [2] by various sides of discourse.

--

[1] https://jigsaw.google.com/issues/

[2] for example https://boingboing.net/2019/08/14/white-aligned-english.html


I happen to not be afraid of boobs, so ever since my days on Reddit I wish for blocking of random gore instead. This is weirdly pertinent sometimes on DDG's image search.

Edit: to clarify, I'm not afraid of some killing either, thanks to the pop culture of the past seventy years or so. Now, why eye-hurting images of bodily damage pop up on rather innocent searches—that's a haunting mystery. On Reddit, the ‘NSFW’ label is used equally for a vaguely sexually suggestive shape or a close-up more suitable for a surgical journal. As if I didn't get plenty of suggestiveness just from music videos anyway! So my long-standing wish was for an ‘NSFL’ filter instead.


I have never understood how acts of love (at best) or reproduction (at the least) are considered in some societies to be dangerous, shocking, and in need of the strictest censorship -- or at the very least, not on prime-time TV. Yet acts of war, killing, maiming, and violence in general are often the mainstay of entertainment.

Sex is part of human nature – and, I would argue, a much bigger and better part of it than violence and aggression. Why do we hide from it?


If porn needs to be filtered then it needs to be filtered regardless of attitudes towards of depictions of violence, and if it doesn't, it doesn't. We shouldn't choose as a baseline depictions of violence.

Many people say they are negatively affected by porn addiction (whether consumers, or partners of consumers, or parents, or people who feel objectified, even some people in the industry), and they feel strongly about it. Just because sex is a good part of human nature doesn't invalidate that in their eyes. In fact, it is precisely because some consider sex to be good and precious that they want to be much more careful about viewing it or depicting it, and I agree with that.

The number of societies that don't want censored sexuality is near zero. It is not just "some societies". And there are plenty of societies that desire that more than western ones.


Sex is complicated. Sex is not always a beautiful expression of love between committed partners. Sometimes it's a casual pursuit of pleasure. Sometimes it's a whimsical act of exploration.

In many cases sex is the direct cause of much sorrow, misery, and emotional damage. Maybe your partner cheated on you. Maybe you got pregnant and your partner left. Maybe alcohol was involved. Maybe you are lonely and got addicted to pornography. Maybe you didn't use contraceptives and are now seeking (or went and got) an abortion. If you look around in poor communities, you'll find a big source of poverty is... unprotected sex. It turns out, you can pretty much ruin your life as a teenager and guarantee you'll stay in poverty your whole life if you get pregnant and have a baby while you are in middle school/high school.

Unlike war and murder, sex is something most people will participate in (in some form or another). So I would argue that it's more important than ever to consider the types of sexual messages we send in media. Do we want to promote sexual relationships between committed partners or do we want to promote wanton promiscuity? I would argue that whichever you choose will have an impact on some non-negligible % of the future choices of the viewers. To be clear, I think we also need to be careful of depictions of extreme gore/violence as well, but for slightly different reasons.

In general, I'm of the opinion that implicit > explicit for both sex and violence in media, but perhaps there is a time/place for being explicit (i.e. so people understand what really happened during the Holocaust, etc).


People want to avoid the porn industry because it’s sleazy, predatory, and reduces sex to a commodity.


And murder is ok?


You deduced that from his comment?


Porn is to murder as romance is to self-defence.


For some reason in America half a butt cheek is worthy of a 15+ rating in films, but “general release” films are fine with burnt bodies hanging from trees


America doesn't have a '15+' rating, lots of 'PG' movies have butts in them, and what 'G' rated movie has burnt corpses hanging from trees??


I'd rather have every news about the Trumpeteer blocked.


My kid would just turn off the extension and keep his business going... :'(


When I was a kid I probably would have trained this but in reverse so that I only see NSFW images.


Sigh... forks repo


This is not a parental control software. It's made for you to be able to browse the web without worrying about NSFW images.


Luckily in Europe, that is hardly an issue as most countries are quite alright with their bodies and sexualities.


I don't mind about NSFW stuff while I work and my co-workers don't care either. I don't know if it's because we're from Europe or what.

Most of the annoying stuff is blocked with uBlock anyway.


I'm fairly sure quite a few European women would be happy about an optional NSFW filter for their social media DMs.


I'm curious: how would you boss react to such an image appearing on your monitor? Is this considered "OK" in a European workplace?


That depends.

If you're doing your work and something NSFW pops on your screen I doubt your boss will give a fuck.

If you're spending your time watching NSFW stuff in your work time he'll probably be mad, not because of the NSFW stuff but because you're not doing your work.


Probably it would have been forwarded by the boss to start with.

We don't have issues with nudity on prime time, although explicit stuff tends to be shown after 11pm.

In some countries sex shop contents are visible from the street, and you can buy some kinds of toys on the local supermarket.

And to be honest there is hardly anything left to hide when being at the beach or some parks.


You guys are pretty harsh on manga style arts though


Depends I never had any issue on manga comics stores.


You can also simply not worry about NSFW images. If you don't like them, scroll more or close the webpage.


In the USA having something like that on your monitor could be considered sexual harassment if someone else could see it.


I've heard a lot of times about the "American puritanism" but this blows my mind.

Is it true that male teachers can't put their hand in their pockets because they could touch their penis or something like that?


No, everyone is allowed to put their hands in their pockets.


You can easily enforce installations of extensions via Chrome's admin templates.


Has anyone confirmed it isnt tagging non-pornographic images? Breastfeeding, breast exam tutorials, sand dunes, etc

Has anyone tested to see if it correctly handles PoC? That demo site it points to almost exclusively light skinned folk.

These are the basic things I’d want confirmation of.




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