Behind the Blog: Posting Nipples and Digging Data

This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we talk about deciding what images to publish, digging through Meta and Snap data, and finding the Secret Service talking about you.

EMANUEL: Yesterday I published a story about an artist who is documenting her transition on Instagram as part of a project that is testing the limits of human and automated moderation of nudity, as well as testing how AI-powered tools are reading her as either male or female. The point, of course, is to highlight how absurd it is to attempt to police people this way on a massive platform like Instagram, and also perhaps show that, entrenched as it is, binary thinking about gender breaks down when it encounters a trans person. 

I knew that some people would have a strong reaction to this, but I decided to use a screenshot of the artist’s Instagram page for the top image in that story because it looks cool, and more importantly, those are the images that the entire story is about so it’s helpful to have those in mind to understand what we’re talking about. Unsurprisingly, some people didn’t appreciate that choice and either told me so on social media or in notes attached to their decision to unsubscribe from the site. 

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