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An investigation by a British newspaper into child sexual abuse content and terrorist propaganda being shared on\u00a0Facebook has once again drawn critical attention to how the company\u00a0handles complaints about offensive and extremist content\u00a0being shared on its platform.<\/p>\n
And, indeed, how Facebook\u2019s algorithmically driven user generated content sharing platform apparently encourages\u00a0the spread of what can also be illegal material.<\/p>\n
In a report published today,\u00a0The Times<\/a>\u00a0newspaper accuses Facebook\u00a0of publishing child pornography after one of its reporters created a fake profile and was quickly able to find offensive and potentially\u00a0illegal content on the site \u2014 including pedophilic cartoons; a video that apparently shows a child being violently abused; and various types of\u00a0terrorist propaganda including a beheading video made by\u00a0an ISIS supporter, and comments celebrating a recent attack against Christians in Egypt.<\/p>\n The Times says it reported the content to Facebook but in most instances was apparently told the imagery and videos\u00a0did not violate the site\u2019s community standards. (Although, when it subsequently contacted the platform identifying itself as The Times newspaper it says some of pedophilic cartoons that had been kept up by moderators were subsequently removed.)<\/p>\n Facebook says it has since removed all the content reported by the newspaper.<\/p>\n A draft law in Germany is proposing to tackle exactly this issue \u2014 using the threat\u00a0of large fines for social media platforms that fail to quickly take down illegal content after a complaint. Ministers in the German cabinet backed the proposed law\u00a0earlier this month<\/a>, which could be adopted in the current legislative period.<\/p>\n And where one European government is heading, others in the region might well be moved to follow. The UK government, for example, has once again\u00a0been talking tougher on social platforms and terrorism<\/a>, following a terror attack in London last month\u00a0\u2014 with the Home Secretary putting pressure on companies including Facebook to build tools<\/a> to automate the flagging up and taking down of terrorist propaganda.<\/p>\n The Times says its\u00a0reporter created a Facebook profile posing as an IT professional\u00a0in his thirties and befriending more than 100 supporters of ISIS while\u00a0also joining groups promoting \u201clewd or pornographic\u201d images of children. \u201cIt did not take long to come across dozens of objectionable images posted by a mix of jihadists and those with a sexual interest in children,\u201d it writes.<\/p>\n The Times showed the material it found\u00a0to a UK QC, Julian Knowles, who told it that in his view\u00a0many of the images and videos are likely to be illegal \u2014 potentially\u00a0breaching UK indecency laws, and the Terrorism Act 2006 which outlaws speech and publications that directly or indirectly encourage terrorism.<\/p>\n \u201cIf someone reports an illegal\u00a0image to Facebook and a senior moderator signs off on keeping it up, Facebook is at risk of committing a criminal offense because the company might be regarded as assisting or encouraging its publication and distribution,\u201d Knowles told the newspaper.<\/p>\n Last month<\/a> Facebook faced similar accusations over\u00a0its content moderation system, after a BBC investigation looked at how the site responded to reports of child exploitation imagery, and also found the site failed to remove the vast majority of reported imagery.\u00a0Last year<\/a>\u00a0the news organization also found\u00a0that\u00a0closed Facebook groups were being used by pedophiles to share images of child exploitation.<\/p>\n Facebook declined to provide a spokesperson to be interviewed about The Times report, but in an emailed statement Justin Osofsky, VP global operations, told us: \u201cWe are grateful to The Times for bringing this content to our attention. We have removed all of these images, which violate our policies and have no place on Facebook. We are sorry that this occurred. It is clear that we can do better, and we\u2019ll continue to work hard to live up to the high standards people rightly expect of Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n Facebook\u00a0says it employs \u201cthousands\u201d of human moderators, distributed\u00a0in offices\u00a0around\u00a0the world (such as Dublin for European content) to ensure 24\/7 availability. However given the platform has close to 2 billion monthly active users (1.86BN MAUs\u00a0at the end of 2016, to be exact) this is very obviously just the tiniest drop in the ocean of content being uploaded to the site every second of every day.<\/p>\n Human moderation clearly cannot scale to review so much content without there being far\u00a0more human moderators employed by Facebook \u2014 a move it clearly wants to resist, given the costs involved (Facebook\u2019s\u00a0entire company headcount\u00a0only totals\u00a0just over 17,000 staff).<\/p>\n