As the lead for iNatUK, our organisation (the NBN Trust) is involved in supporting a project to engage schools with mapping habitats and wildlife on their school sites, the National Education Nature Park. As part of the project the schools will be using iNaturalist to document the wildlife on their site.
Whilst participating schools have been guided on how to use iNaturalist sensibly and monitor what their pupils are uploading, unfortunately there is still the issue with photos being uploaded with children captured in them. Whilst we will be monitoring observations uploaded by participating schools and notifying them when we spot any inappropriate photos, so they can be removed, we wanted to enquire is there a way for observations/images to removed immediately by site admins, please?
Any advice and guidance on this topic would be greatly appreciated!
This is something that would need to change in the guidelines from staff. As a curator myself ive always disliked the stance of the guidelines on this and wish to see most images of minors, especially unconsenting, joking, non wildlife encounters be hidden. Though theoretically images of unconsenting minors can be hidden by curators regardless of what the curator guidelines say. Ive seen this a few times despite it technically being against ths curator guidelines.
If you ever feel you find something inappropriate, create a flag. As situations can be different, depending on the situation images may be hidden by curators or not, and if need be deleted by staff. But generally if the only reason is there is a minor in the image, usually no action is taken due to the guidelines.
Inappropriate photos can be flagged and can subsequently be hidden by a curator, but this is not instantaneous. You might want to consider including a curator as a member of your project team to focus specifically on this issue.
Please flag every photo of a human as āInappropriateā that is identified as anything but Homo sapiens or Genus Homo.
Curators will usually hide both the inappropriate ID and the photo within 24 hours.
Unfortunately there is not much more that Inat can do since photos of minors do not violate the Inat community guidelines(although I personally want it banned.)
Iāve found over 300 of these photos( Flags Ā· iNaturalist, but that is less than 2% of them unfortunately.
Human nudity (including semi-nude children) and/or sexual activity
Images or words meeting the iNaturalist definition of hate speech
Threats or depictions of violence against humans
Images being used to bully or harass someone, such as a photo in combination with an insulting comment or ID
Sensitive information accidentally posted by the observer, such as personal information or the location of threatened species (eg if a map or sign is included)