Sadly for many women, receiving unsolicited dick pics has become part and parcel of social media – but why should it be?
We all know it’s unacceptable to flash our junk at random people in the street, so why do people think it’s okay in digital form?
Well, one woman is so damn sick of it, she’s launched a new plugin on Twitter called Safe DM, which stops unwanted penis pictures from reaching their intended receiver.
The impressive feature was created by developer Kelsey Bressler, who came up with the idea after she received an unsolicited dick pic last year.
She used artificial intelligence to build the plugin and trained its algorithm on pictures of penises – which meant she had to put a call out for dick pics on Twitter. That’s something you certainly don’t see every day.
Writing on Twitter, Kelsey said:
I’m soliciting dick pics at the handle @showyodiq .
This is not a joke.
I am testing a filter that is under development which will automatically detect dick pics in DMs and handle them on behalf of the user (delete, delete&block).
18+ , consensual, human dicks only please.
As per the BBC, Kelsey received more than 4,000 dick pics, which were all used to train the plugin to detect a surprise phallus.
The plugin is currently only available for direct messages on Twitter, however Kelsey said she’s currently in talks with another social media company to adapt the plugin for another platform.
She said:
We would like to roll this out on other social media platforms and are discussing where to go next.
Sadly, Twitter isn’t the only platform in which unsolicited nude pictures are an issue, with 46% of millennial women saying they have received at least one unwanted dick pic, according to a 2018 YouGov survey.
SafeDM is said to have a 99% success rate, and was tested by Buzzfeed’s Cameron Wilson. He said the filter does indeed work, although he did notice a two- or three-minute delay and also found the filter blocks other images that could resemble a penis, including a dildo and a suggestively-shaped lipstick – which I’d say is pretty successful for a computer.
While I fully believe Kelsey is the hero of our generation for safeguarding women online, we must strive to achieve a world where we don’t need to protected from cyberflashers.
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Emma Rosemurgey is an NCTJ trained Journalist who started her career by producing The Royal Rosemurgey newspaper in 2004, which kept her family up to date with the goings on of her sleepy north east village. She graduated from the University of Central Lancashire in Preston and started her career in regional newspapers before joining Tyla (formerly Pretty 52) in 2017, and progressing onto UNILAD in 2019.