I'm in Vietnam and about six months ago I made a new Twitter account for our business.
I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff.
I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and coffee related accounts and the suggestions got better after a few days but not entirely. Then for reasons about a month ago I decided that our business shouldn't use Twitter anyway.
Incidentally when I log into my personal Facebook account here, since I have personalized ads turned off I get shown local Vietnamese language ads in the sidebar and for several months these have just been straight up hardcore porn. Loads of penis enlargement ads featuring close ups of actual penises, lots of "hot women in your area" showing way more than I want to see when I just logged in to check how my family back home in Europe are doing.
Just because you don't see unwanted stuff on social media, don't assume other people have the same experience. Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar), and we all know what's going on with Twitter. I'm pretty sure that within a pretty short timeframe it's no longer going to be borderline underage stuff in non English speaking parts of the world.
> Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar)
None of us know what kind of content moderation went on there. There is no public index of what gets removed, and according to Brandon Silverman, even Facebook itself does not review it:
> "violating content... in a lot of cases what happens is it gets removed, it gets taken down from the platform, and more often than not, essentially deleted, just disappears forever. A lot of that violating content is really important to the public interest, and it would be enormously valuable if we were able to create spaces for that content and the actors involved and the networks they create and build to be studied by an outside community, and an independent research ecosystem over time."
It's possible that whoever was removing content there was close to the military. We don't know. Other Asian countries could have similar influence. Isn't it accepted that Mark wants to bring Facebook to China? Maybe they wanted to see Facebook demonstrate its content controls before allowing them in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can tell you that this new account got absolutely flooded with porn suggestions, all Vietnamese language, a lot of it looking like borderline underage stuff.
I'm not anti-porn in any way but this was pretty awful. My business is a bakery, I did nothing to invite these suggestions except sign up. I did start to follow bakery and coffee related accounts and the suggestions got better after a few days but not entirely. Then for reasons about a month ago I decided that our business shouldn't use Twitter anyway.
Incidentally when I log into my personal Facebook account here, since I have personalized ads turned off I get shown local Vietnamese language ads in the sidebar and for several months these have just been straight up hardcore porn. Loads of penis enlargement ads featuring close ups of actual penises, lots of "hot women in your area" showing way more than I want to see when I just logged in to check how my family back home in Europe are doing.
Just because you don't see unwanted stuff on social media, don't assume other people have the same experience. Facebook are notorious for basically doing zero content moderation in Asian countries (see Myanmar), and we all know what's going on with Twitter. I'm pretty sure that within a pretty short timeframe it's no longer going to be borderline underage stuff in non English speaking parts of the world.