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Facebook has again been criticized for failing to remove\u00a0child exploitation imagery from its platform following a BBC investigation into its\u00a0system for reporting inappropriate content.<\/p>\n
Last year<\/a>\u00a0the news organization reported that\u00a0closed Facebook groups were being used by pedophiles to share images of child exploitation. At the time\u00a0Facebook\u2019s head of public policy told it he was committed to removing \u201ccontent that shouldn\u2019t be there\u201d, and Facebook has\u00a0since told the BBC\u00a0it has\u00a0improved its reporting system.<\/p>\n However,\u00a0in a follow-up article\u00a0published today, the\u00a0BBC again\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0finding sexualized images of children being shared on Facebook \u2014 the vast majority of which the social networking giant failed to remove after the BBC initially reported\u00a0them.<\/p>\n The\u00a0BBC said\u00a0it used the Facebook report button to alert the company to 100 images that\u00a0appeared to break its guidelines against obscene and\/or sexually suggestive content\u00a0\u2014 including from pages that it said were explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children.<\/p>\n Of the 100 reported images only 18 were removed by Facebook, according to the BBC. It also found\u00a0five convicted pedophiles with profiles and reported them to Facebook via its own system\u00a0but says none of the accounts were taken down\u00a0\u2014 despite Facebook\u2019s own rules forbidding convicted sex offenders from having accounts.<\/p>\n In response to the report, the chairman of the UK House of Commons\u2019 media committee, Damian Collins, told the BBC<\/a> he has\u00a0\u201cgrave doubts\u201d about the effectiveness of Facebook\u2019s\u00a0content moderation systems.<\/p>\n \u201cI think it raises the question of how can users make effective complaints to Facebook about content that is disturbing, shouldn\u2019t be on the site, and have confidence that that will be acted upon,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In a further twist,\u00a0the 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\u00a0examples of reported content that had not been removed.<\/p>\n TechCrunch understands Facebook\u00a0was following CEOP<\/a> guidelines at this point \u2014 although the BBC\u00a0claims it only sent images after being asked by Facebook to share examples of reported content. However viewing or sharing child exploitation images is illegal in the UK. The BBC would have to have sent Facebook links to illegal\u00a0content, rather than shared images directly to avoid being reported \u2014 so it\u2019s possible this aspect of the story boils down to a miscommunication.<\/p>\n Facebook declined to answer our\u00a0questions \u2014 and declined to be interviewed on a flagship BBC news program about its content moderation problems \u2014 but in\u00a0an emailed statement UK policy director, Simon Milner, said: \u201cWe have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards. This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures. Facebook has been recognized as one of the best platforms on the internet for child safety.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIt is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation. When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry\u2019s standard practice and reported them to CEOP. We also reported the child exploitation images that had been shared on our own platform. This matter is now in the hands of the authorities,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n The wider issue here is that Facebook\u2019s content moderation system remains\u00a0very clearly very far from perfect. And contextual content moderation is evidently a vast problem that requires far more resources\u00a0that are being devoted to it by Facebook. Even if the company\u00a0employs \u201cthousands\u201d of human moderators, distributed\u00a0in offices\u00a0around\u00a0the world (such as Dublin for European content) to ensure 24\/7 availability, it\u2019s\u00a0still a drop in the ocean for a platform with more than a billion active users sharing multiple types of content on an ongoing basis.<\/p>\n Technology solutions can\u00a0be part of the solution \u2014 such as Microsoft\u2019s PhotoDNA cloud service<\/a>, which\u00a0can identify known child abuse images, for example \u2014 but such systems can\u2019t\u00a0help identify\u00a0unknown obscene material. It\u2019s a problem that\u00a0necessitates\u00a0human-moderation and enough human moderators to review user reports in a timely fashion so that problem content can be identified accurately and removed promptly \u2014 in other words, the opposite of what appears to have\u00a0happened in this instance.<\/p>\n