Facebook has repeatedly failed to monitor objectionable activities in their social media platform, be it the spreading of false news or even child porn. BBC journalists have managed to unearth secret child porn rings that operated out of Facebook and being a good fellow they decided to inform Facebook so that they could take measures against it. However, they found police authorities on their doorstep for allegedly distributing illegal images on the social-networking platform.
Apparently, BBC has been working on the prevalence of child porn rings that operate out of Facebook for some time now and they decided to call upon a Facebook spokesperson, to talk about the moderation tools or the lack of it in their platform. Facebook agreed to the interview, but insisted to take a look at those images pertaining to child porn groups.
BBC reporters felt it was a fair enough demand and complied. Instead of cleaning up their act and thanking the reporters for playing the Good Samaritan, Facebook reported the BBC journalists to the police and also canceled the interview, reported BBC.
Facebook has its own take on what it has done and when asked for a definitive response, all they said was "It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation. When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry's standard practice and reported them to CEOP [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre]."
Facebook further went on to claim that it doesn't tolerate "Nudity or other sexually suggestive content" on its platform.
Just to give a backdrop of what BBC has actually uncovered on Facebook. The journalists found that there were several secret groups that were being used by paedophiles to form a nodal point to meet and swap images.
BBC used the "report" button to make Facebook aware of 100 images that do not comply with their guidelines. It included those pages that showed interest of men towards paedophilia, images of girls who were barely in their teens in highly evocative poses, which had obscenity towards them in the comment section and an image which was a screen grab from a video that portrayed child abuse alongside a request to spread it around.
So did Facebook, rise up to the task even after being informed of such atrocities? Well, only 18 out of those 100 images were removed and the other 82 according to Facebook's automated reply were not something that violated the "community standards."
Facebook has a policy which is strictly against convicted sex offenders to have an account in their platform, however, BBC managed to find five such individuals, who have been convicted but have profiles in the social media platform. Even after reporting them to Facebook, those were not taken down.
Facebook released a statement that said, "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....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."
Facebook is now slated to be questioned at Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee that houses an influential group of British parliamentarians on its failure to remove these obscene images of children after this BBC investigation surfaced, according to media reports.
