To be clear, the user has posted no proof that he’s actually been able to do this, and hasn’t published any code, databases, or anything else besides an empty GitLab page to verify this is real. When Motherboard contacted the user over Weibo chat, he said they will release “database schema” and “technical details” next week, and did not comment further.

In a Monday post on Weibo, the user, who says he's based in Germany, claimed to have “successfully identified more than 100,000 young ladies” in the adult industry “on a global scale.”

Someone posting on Chinese social network Weibo claims to have used facial recognition to cross-reference women’s photos on social media with faces pulled from videos on adult platforms like Pornhub.

Still, his post has gone viral in both China on Weibo and in the United States on Twitter after a Stanford political science PhD candidate tweeted them with translations, which Motherboard independently verified. This has led prominent activists and academics to discuss the potential implications of the technology.

According to Weibo posts, the user and some of his programming friends used facial recognition to detect faces in porn content using photos from social platforms. His reasoning for making this program, he wrote, is “to have the right to know on both sides of the marriage.” After public outcry, he later claimed his intention was to allow women, with or without their fiancées, to check if they are on porn sites and to send a copyright takedown request.

"This is horrendous and a pitch-perfect example of how these systems, globally, enable male dominance," Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her, tweeted on Tuesday about the alleged project. "Surveillance, impersonation, extortion, misinformation all happen to women first and then move to the public sphere, where, once men are affected, it starts to get attention."

Whether the Weibo user’s claims are trustworthy or not is beside the point, now that experts in feminist studies and machine learning have decried this project as algorithmically-targeted harassment. This kind of program’s existence is both possible and frightening, and has started a conversation around whether such a program would be an ethically or legally responsible use of AI.