If you were thinking about using Zoom for a virtual sex party, think again

Sex parties

Zoom, the video uplink app once strictly used for stuffy, white shirt conference calls, is now the everyday way people say hello to friends, loved ones and colleagues.

Zoom has also become an integral medium for sex parties, too.

For years it’s been used in between to chat about Microsoft Excel spreadsheet between sips of filter coffee, but now LGBT+ folks, ever adaptable, are using it to host sex parties for a community isolated and fragmented by the coronavirus lockdown.

But before users log-in for the next session, Zoom have warned that not only are both nudity and pornography banned under its “acceptable use” policy, but the company uses a “mix of tools”, including machine learning, to identify accounts violating its rules.

O-oh.

Zoom use ‘machine learning’ to find out if users are posting pornography or having online sex. 

According to Bussiness Insider, Zoom representatives would not directly specify what the machine learning tools are.

Yet, the spokesperson stressed, the video-conferencing company does not monitor meetings or the contents of that meeting.

Zoom has, since lockdown measures became a daily reality for countless across the world, seen a soar in its user base, with more than 200 million daily users in March.

A slice of that user base are queer folks adhering to social distancing policies by hosting sex parties on the app. LGBT+ folks from all across the world have dialled into chats to battle both coronavirus and the sexual drought plaguing the word.

Nothing quite like the ingenuity of the human spirit, huh?

But according to Zoom’s “acceptable use” policy, users may not use the technology to “engage in any activity that is harmful, obscene, or indecent, particularly as such would be understood in the context of business usage”.

Moreover, the policy specifies that this includes: “Displays of nudity, violence, pornography, sexually explicit material, or criminal activity.”

The spokesperson said that the company will take a “number of actions: against those to found to have broken these guidelines”.

Maybe it’s time to resurrect Skype?