Facebook open-sources algorithms for detecting child exploitation and terrorism imagery
Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
Facebook will open-source two algorithms it uses to identify child sexual exploitation, terrorist propaganda, and graphic violence, the company said today. PDQ and TMK+PDQF, a pair of technologies that store files as digital hashes and compare them with known examples of harmful content, have been released on Github, Facebook said in a blog post.
Facebook said it hopes that other tech companies, nonprofit organizations, and individual developers will use the technology to identify more harmful content and add it to shared databases. That helps platforms remove the content more quickly when people attempt to upload it.
“For those who already use their own or other content matching technology, these technologies are another layer of...