About

Is It Porn? is a web application designed to analyze the visual and textual content within any user-submitted image and determine whether it is pornography, more specifically, the degree of its likelihood in percentage. In early September 2015, the app gained a lot of traction on 4chan for its poor accuracy in performance, in similar vein to the popularity of the website How-Old.net.

History

The website,^[1] which is powered by a content filter made of machine learning algorithms, was launched in July 2015. However, the site mostly went unnoticed until late August, when a Facebook page for the app was created on August 27th, 2015 featuring a picture of a guy in a speedo (shown bellow, left).^[6] The same day, a Touhou thread on /v/ also used the app (shown bellow, right).^[7]

In the following days, the site still remained little known and din't gain traction until September 5th, 2015, when a dedicated thread about the site was created on /v/ (video games) board,^[8] with the original post featuring a screencap of the videogame Dead or Alive. Soon, other boards from the site also started threads about the app,^[2] including /h/,^[9] /vp/,^[10] /co/^[11] and /mlp/,^[12] before spreading to other memetic hubsites like Tumblr,^[4] Twitter^[3] and reddit.^[13] As of September 11th, 2015, the website has received over 40,000 submissions.

Various Examples

External References