Russian authorities announce launch of Oculus, an automated system for detecting ‘LGBT propaganda’ and other banned content online
The Main Radio Frequency Center, an entity overseen by Russia’s federal censorship agency, announced Monday that it has launched a new automated system called Oculus that will search the Internet for photo and video content that’s banned under Russian law.
A 57.7-million-ruble (about $783,000) tender to develop the neural network that will power the new system was first announced in September 2021. In December 2022, authorities began testing the system, and while it’s purportedly operating at full force, developers will continue “enhancing” it until 2025, according to the press release.
The statement also said that Oculus will “automatically detect violations such as extremism, calls for illegal assemblies, suicide, content that promotes drugs, and LGBT propaganda.” According to the center, federal employees previously had to search for banned content manually and “process” an average of 106 illegal images and 101 illegal videos per day, whereas Oculus is capable of analyzing more than 200,000 images per day.
In November 2022, a Belarusian hacker group called Cyberpartisans hacked into an internal network used by the Main Radio Frequency Center and downloaded more than two terabytes of documents. According to information from the leak, in addition to the illegal content listed above, Russian authorities are training Oculus to find undesirable depictions of Putin.
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