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| Poster: | MoonMetropolis 2 | Date: | Apr 21, 2026 1:06pm |
| Forum: | opensource_movies | Subject: | An AI Bot is Randomly Flagging and Removing Uploads For Being "NSFW" |
Take, for example, this:
https://archive.org/details/children_of_god
This is a Bahamian film about two gay men and the homophobia that they face in the Bahamas. It contains no nudity or explicit sexual content. Someone flagged it as NSFW simply because it revolves around gay characters, and it was then deleted because it was marked as NSFW.
Or take this TV show:
https://archive.org/details/that_80s_show
This is just a generic sitcom that aired on network TV. It contains ZERO NSFW content of any sort. Someone, however, decided to falsely report it as "NSFW", so it got deleted a few weeks later by the censorship bot, despite the obvious fact that it is not even remotely NSFW.
This is an easy way for anyone to get any upload removed. Just flag it as NSFW - even if it is clearly not - and it will then be automatically removed by a bot.
Quite frankly, I'm getting REALLY sick of this nonsense. Archive.org is supposed to be an uncensored platform, and uploads marked as NSFW are supposed to only require a login to view, not be removed entirely. So why, then, are you having an AI bot automatically remove anything flagged as "NSFW"? In fact, I honestly suspect that an AI bot is the one DOING the flagging, because most of the things that I've seen marked as NSFW are not even NSFW at all. Most of the time, uploads just get flagged as NSFW because of certain words or phrases in the titles/keywords/descriptions, which makes it very obvious that this is some kind of AI algorithm doing it. Random uploads are marked as NSFW all at once, then deleted all at once a few weeks later in a massive, site-wide purge. It is extremely obvious bot censorship.
What makes this ESPECIALLY infuriating is that so much of the content marked as "NSFW" and then removed by the bot is INCREDIBLY RARE content that was absolutely impossible to find anywhere else - and, unless someone still has it, then it's gone forever.
To the Archive.org uploaders: none of your uploads are safe. If someone wants your upload gone, literally all that they have to do is hit the "report" button and it will then be marked as NSFW and deleted by the bot a few weeks later, no questions asked.
To Archive.org: you cannot seriously continue to call yourself an archival site if you keep doing this. If you want to turn your site into a heavily censored, AI-moderated hell hole like YouTube, then, by all means, go right ahead, but don't be surprised in the least when people then start moving to alternative platforms.
I think that it's time for media archivists to start building alternative sites to archive media, because it is very clear, at this point, that nothing is safe on Archive.org. Quite frankly, any site with AI moderation should be avoided like the plague, and this is exactly why.
