Facebook Under Fire Over Policing of Questionable Content -- Update
08 March 2017 - 10:43AM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman and Stu Woo
Facebook Inc. is once again on the defensive about how it
reviews content on its site after a British Broadcasting Corp.
investigation showed it failed to remove 82 of the 100 child
exploitation images flagged by the news service.
In its report Tuesday, the BBC said it flagged 100 posts of
child exploitation to Facebook by clicking a drop-down menu and
hitting "report this post." These reports trigger a review that can
result in Facebook removing posts for breaking their decency
standards.
The posts included images of children in "highly sexualized"
poses and a still from a child-abuse video, the BBC said. Just 18
of the 100 flagged posts were taken down, the BBC said, adding that
Facebook sent automated messages saying the remaining 82 didn't
break its community standards.
"We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have
now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards,"
Facebook said Tuesday. "This content is no longer on our platform.
We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve
our reporting and takedown measures."
The BBC said it wanted to see if Facebook followed its
guidelines, so it flagged content that included pages explicitly
for men with a sexual interest in children; images of minors in
highly sexualized poses, with obscene comments posted beside them;
groups with names such as "hot xxxx schoolgirls" containing stolen
images of children; and an image that appeared to be a still from a
video of child abuse, with a request below it to share "child
pornography."
In an odd twist, Facebook also reported the BBC to
law-enforcement officials focused on organized crime, child
exploitation and other serious offenses after the news service
provided Facebook with screenshots of the images.
On Tuesday, the BBC said it had sent the images to Facebook's
communications team in London at its request. Facebook replied that
it needed to see examples of the content before conducting an
interview, the BBC said.
"It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child
exploitation," said Simon Milner, Facebook's U.K. policy director.
"When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry's
standard practice and reported them to CEOP," the Child
Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a division of the
National Crime Agency.
The BBC said Facebook also canceled its interview with the news
organization.
Over the past year, Facebook has faced criticism for allowing
violent or sensitive live videos to remain on its site, including a
violent attack on a Chicago teenager. These troubles were detailed
in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.
But Facebook has also been overzealous in censoring images at
time. Last fall, Facebook sparked an uproar when it deleted posts
containing a famous Vietnam War photo of a girl fleeing napalm
bombs. Facebook later reversed the decision.
The incident with the BBC is unlikely to repair the relationship
between Facebook and media companies. Facebook has been meeting
news organizations in recent weeks in an effort to smooth things
over after a rocky year that included accusations of allowing fake
news to proliferate on its site.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Stu
Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 07, 2017 18:28 ET (23:28 GMT)
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