Logos Bible Software Addresses Recent Surge of Sexually Explicit Content: ‘We are both sorry and frustrated’
Logos Bible Software has issued a new community update following our recent articles revealing that the company was still selling hundreds of pornographic and sexually explicit books on their platform despite claiming they’d got a handle on it, offering that they are both “sorry and frustrated” that this content still exists while insisting that their team is “working on getting it right.”
The new missive comes months after we uncovered that the storied company had thousands of illicit books available to their readers and was slow in dealing with their removal. While Logos seemingly resolved the issue months ago, we recently revealed that the processes they put in place were not working, both the automatic filtering and manual review, by discovering hundreds of filthy titles still present and in purchasable condition, resulting in a newly announced change:
We are both sorry and frustrated that additional illicit content has gotten through our content publishing process. We’re taking this seriously, and our team is working on getting it right. Further, we’re investing in strengthening our filters so the Logos platform is always a safe place for going deeper in the Bible.
Our previous efforts to tighten our filters are still working as intended, but we’ve found additional ways that content has been sneaking through, and we are closing those gaps.
A brief summary of the issue and the action we’re taking:
Our filters are currently set up to exclude books in certain BISAC subject categories that don’t adhere to our distribution philosophy. However, some of the inappropriate titles we removed today are coded to seemingly innocuous BISAC categories like biography, health and fitness, and performing arts.
When we were notified of inappropriate titles on our site earlier this year, we significantly expanded the list of BISAC category exclusions. While this has helped, it has proven to be insufficient. As a result, we are taking two additional steps to prevent illicit titles from being added to our platform:
We are implementing a regular manual review of all of our sites to remove titles that violate our distribution philosophy, and many of you have already noticed this working.
Our team is developing a new content vetting tool based on large language model technology to scan titles and descriptions of all ebooks before they go live. The tool will filter out any titles that include keywords flagged as high risk for violating our distribution philosophy. Our team will then manually check these titles to determine whether or not they are appropriate for our platform.
Thank you for your patience and support. We will continue working to improve our content filtering process, and we’ll post updates here and in the forum thread.
At present, there are still hundreds of erotic books available, many of them coming from the publisher “Open Road Media Romance” which promises “sexy” stories and shirtless men, as well as strange books like this, where a manual word review is likely necessary to resolve it.
We hope they deal with them soon.