DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The local official behind the crusade for Germany to require age verification for viewing sexual content is now seeking to expand to all of Europe the use of his new AI tool, KIVI, which automatically scans all online content to determine which images are not compliant with the law.
Last month, as XBIZ reported, Tobias Schmid, director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia, and one-man War on Porn, held a press conference boasting of the surveillance. He explained that he coined the name KIVI after “KI” — the German initials for AI — and “VI” from the Latin word “vigilare,” meaning “to survey.”
Today, German tech news site NetzPolitik.org reported that Schmid’s regulatory bureaucracy is currently “working with KIVI throughout Germany and hopes that the whole of Europe will soon be using this tool to monitor the public internet.”
NetzPolitik reporter Sebastian Meineck, who has been covering Schmid’s meticulous, obsessive attempts to ban all sexual content from open platforms in Germany and Europe, wrote that Schmid told a newspaper, “We are pleased that our European colleagues are also very interested.”
Schmid’s agency “networks with regulatory authorities in other EU countries in a group called ERGA (European Regulators Group for Audiovisual Media Services).”
A spokeswoman for the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed to NetzPolitik that “there were exploratory talks with several authorities” about expanding KIVI surveillance all across Europe.
First Düsseldorf, Then the Continent
KIVI was developed by Berlin-based Condat under local bureaucrat Schmid’s supervision and is now reportedly being used by all 14 state media authorities in Germany. While KIVI has been trained to detect categories like “extremism, hate speech, swastikas or the glorification of drugs,” Schmid also included “pornography” as a target for the new surveillance engine.
Schmid is particularly obsessed with “pornography” and has repeatedly singled out “gangbangs” as a concept that bothers him.
KIVI is currently surveying images, texts and videos on all websites, as well as apps like “Telegram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, the Russian Facebook competitor VKontakte and the video portal Bitchute,” NetzPolitik reported.
According to NetzPolitik’s Meineck, “the media regulator under director Tobias Schmid appears to play a leading role in the distribution of the surveillance software.” If the obscure bureaucrat’s European expansion dreams come true, “the regulatory authority from North Rhine-Westphalia would be largely responsible for the introduction of a European porn detector,” Meineck added.
Main Image: Tobias Schmid, director of the State Media Authority of North Rhine-Westphalia