Facebook has again been criticized for failing to remove child exploitation imagery from its platform following a BBC investigation into its system for..
Facebook has again been criticized for failing to remove child exploitation imagery from its platform following a BBC investigation into its system for reporting inappropriate content.
Last year the news organization reported that closed Facebook groups were being used by pedophiles to share images of child exploitation. At the time Facebook’s head of public policy told it he was committed to removing “content that shouldn’t be there”, and Facebook has since told the BBC it has improved its reporting system.
However, in a follow-up article published today, the BBC again reports finding sexualized images of children being shared on Facebook — the vast majority of which the social networking giant failed to remove after the BBC initially reported them.
The BBC said it used the Facebook report button to alert the company to 100 images that appeared to break its guidelines against obscene and/or sexually suggestive content — including from pages that it said were explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children.
Of the 100 reported images only 18 were removed by Facebook, according to the BBC. It also found five convicted pedophiles with profiles and reported them to Facebook via its own system but says none of the accounts were taken down — despite Facebook’s own rules forbidding convicted sex offenders from having accounts.
In response to the report, the chairman of the UK House of Commons’ media committee, Damian Collins, told the BBC he has “grave doubts” about the effectiveness of Facebook’s content moderation systems.
“I think it raises the question of how can users make effective complaints to Facebook about content that is disturbing, shouldn’t be on the site, and have confidence that will be acted upon,” he said.
In a further twist, the news organization was subsequently reported to the police by Facebook after sharing some of the reported images directly with Facebook when it asked to send examples of reported content that had not been removed.
