Difference between Criminal Activity, Allegation, and Disturbing

These types of problematic content capture similar scenarios:

• criminal_activity
• allegation
• disturbing

They do have differences between them.

Criminal Activity

The criminal_activity type detects actual ongoing activity. For example: Attempts to sell illicit items online, death threats, and more.

The purpose of this type is to detect foul play going in the content. Nothing else.

It is not the same as conversations about alleged criminal acts. For example, if an article describes a sting raid on a meth lab, it is not tagged as abuse.

If you are looking to locate conversations about crimes, look at the topics section.

Also see: Criminal Activity

Allegation

What happens if someone talks about a crime that allegedly happened to them? This is what allegation is meant to tackle.

The difference between allegation and criminal_activity is similar to the venerable This is not a pipe by René Magritte.

We don’t know if it’s true and it’s not happening right now, but we should not ignore it.

On the other hand, we can’t lump it together with the criminal activity type, because it would create false positives in communities of survivors of abuse, for example.

For law enforcement needs, the distinction must be clear, too: an allegation is not the same as actual activity. And even if it’s a real crime is to be reported, the procedures are very different.

Also see: Allegations

Disturbing

The third type, disturbing, flags graphic depictions of death, injury, etc. whether they are crime-related, or not.

In most cases, these depictions do not overlap with the criminal_activity type.

They may or may not overlap with the allegation type.

Not all death or injury are considered disturbing, too.

Also see: Disturbing Content