In the last week or so, 10 out of the 25 most popular cameos using my face are various fetishes, including one where I’m a centaur-woman pregnant with octoplets. It’s not just me, either. I’ve seen this kind of content made with cameos of other women: female creators, another woman tech reporter, and a female employee of a prominent venture-capital firm.
**I don’t get why anyone is surprised **
In a situation where someone doesn’t understand the implications and a corporation can make money of their misfortune. That pretty much describes most of social media.
Love this bit
But she did consent when she allowed people to use her face. I’m not saying what those people are doing with it are morally right but she consented when she clicked the box allowing cameos.
As a journalist she did it to see what would happen. And then wrote an article about what happened. This is definitely worth talking about even if she did click the box, the box isn’t really the point here.
She consented to something but didn’t consider/understand what that something implies. While it might be obvious for terminally online people, most people don’t expect “cameos” to necessarily mean “fetish porn cameos”.
What else would it mean? That’s the kind of content the internet creates.
You may have spent too much of your lifetime on the internet if you think that this should be common knowledge, haha
(I say that as someone who probably fits into that category)
Haha fair enough. Although I didn’t mean that specifically, just weird sexual content in general.
If someone expects content moderation or the other safeguards you have in large parts of the internet it might come as a surprise that a large platform allows fetish porn content to be made with “cameos”.
Tbh, the word itself is super vague and ambiguous and doesn’t reflect what it means in this context.
I assume many people just live in a sanitized, sterile internet created by Google/Meta et al. They might have never encountered the gooner/pervert culture before. Again, when most people see “cameo” their mind doesn’t jump to “fetish porn cameo”. As such, I don’t think there was real consent here.
so… she’s stupid?
The question is what did she consent to (as in, what was the thing she did expect that this checkbox created)?
“Cameo” doesn’t exactly evoke “allow people to create fetish porn with my face”.
If the button was labelled with that or some other more clear text, I don’t think there would have been a need for this article.
And that’s pretty much the point of this article: “Beware of corporate double-speek, this harmless word here means ‘allow fetish porn with your face’”, and that kind of warning article is not only important but pretty much essential in today’s world, where “autopilot” doesn’t mean that the car is fully self-driving, and where even “full self-driving” doesn’t mean “fully self-driving”.
And the only indication one has that words don’t mean what they mean is a multiple hundred page long terms of services full of legal jargon that most people can’t understand but that legally protect the corporation.
As Marc-Uwe Kling said: “Die Welt ist voll von Arschlöchern. Rechtlich abgesicherten Arschlöchern.”
“The world is full of assholes. Legally protected assholes.”