Slashdot Mirror
Facebook Reports BBC To Police Following Publication's 'Sexualized Images' Investigation (bbc.com)
"Grave doubts" have emerged about the effectiveness of Facebook's moderation system after an investigation by the BBC last year revealed the social network was failing to remove sexualised images of children even after they were reported. Damian Collins, chair of the culture, media and sport committee, made the comments as he criticised Facebook's handling of the images, dozens of which were reported to the company by the BBC and fewer than 20% were removed. After the BBC sent evidence of the photos to Facebook, the social media company reported the BBC to the police for distributing the images, which had been shared on private Facebook groups intended for paedophiles. From a report on BBC: When provided with examples of the images, Facebook reported the BBC journalists involved to the police and cancelled plans for an interview. It subsequently issued a statement: "It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation." Mr Collins said it was extraordinary that the BBC had been reported to the authorities when it was trying to "help clean up the network." [...] Information the BBC provided to the police led to one man being sent to prison for four years.
I take it FB is unfamiliar with the Streisand effect.
Anytime you find kiddie images, you must immediately report them to the proper authorities or else you will face prosecution. Had the BBC not spent time trying to make someone look bad and instead reported these images to the police, the police would have then contacted Facebook who would have removed them in a timely manner.
Here's hoping there was a lengthy penalty by the police to said "journalist" for trying to manufacture outrage!
> FTA: "It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation.
Except they are *not* images of people exploiting children. They are pictures that young adults have taken of themselves and posted.
Standard teen facebook stuff that gets lots of likes and annoys their parents. Then the perverts copy the photos and add distasteful comments. In a hidden, private forum.
So what do you do? Where draw the line? Do we end up dressing out kids in burqas, or shrug and move on with our lives?
The common language makes it easy to overlook significant cultural differences between the UK and the US. I believe one of them may have played a role here. In many places there is a tendency for mere technical questions of process to make people lose sight of the original sense (purpose and intent) of rules. (This is not one-dimensional. As a German I keep being surprised by how the balance works in the UK. Sometimes the balance in the UK is much more on the procedure side than I am used to, and sometimes it's much more on the sense side.)
It appears to me that in the US it is considered OK when rules and procedures are almost completely detached from their purpose, whereas in most cultures a relatively strong connection is required to give rules legitimacy. Some examples:
- It is legal for US prosecutors to seek the prosecution of people they know to be innocent. Some even use procedural tricks to ensure convictions of innocents. There are countless examples of this which do not draw much attention. Every one of them would make a huge scandal here in Europe.
- Instead of correcting the balance between the legislative power of the federal government and those of individual states, the US legal system is making use of absurd 'crimes' such as crossing state lines (or doing some harmless other thing that happens to fall under federal jurisdiction) while committing an actual crime.
- Gerrymandering is widely considered normal practice.
- Prisoners have become an important economic resource in the US, comparable to the former role of slaves.
- In the US, a pre-teen can become registered sex offenders with a ban on getting near schools for a minor 'offence' such as taking a nude picture of themselves or sexual experiments with another (even older) child. In the US, it is possible for two people to rape *each other* at the very same moment in time.
- In the US, companies that actually innovate can be completely annihilated by shell companies holding trivial and fraudulent patents.
I have heard that baseball is also symptomatic of this phenomenon, but as I never even tried to understand that, I can't claim that it is. Sometimes extreme excesses stemming from this approach make international headlines, such as when a kindergarten calls in the police because a four-year-old is throwing a tantrum, and the police takes the child to prison (obviously notifying the parents only afterwards). Or when a state makes insists on putting someone to death after his innocence has been established beyond doubt.
Here is how I think this applies to the current situation:
For someone in the UK it's clear that the goal is to prevent the abuse of children, or at least to prevent perverts from exchanging images that are problematic in one way or another. If you try to abuse technicalities for your own gain, you lose face. But for a huge US concern, losing face is not an issue any more than to a shameless liar-president. To them, any laws related to child abuse are just part of the myriad of rules whose purpose is to function as landmines. They act as a barrier to entry into lucrative areas of commerce: expensive legal advice is required to maneuver around them and deal with the occasional explosion. If a weaker competitor, such as a national tv broadcaster, does anything you construe as an attack (because thinking of the children is OBVIOUSLY just an excuse), then you are justified to play dirty
"It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation." ...said the company responsible for hosting and making availble those images.
My work internet blocks Oglaf, so I can't find and link the strip in question, but a couple weeks ago my partner put the strip up on her Facebook page. A day later, the strip had been taken down because it was 'offensive'. It's a cartoon, and the punchline was basically that a guy fucks lemons. Woo. It's NSFW, I guess, but it involves two adults and lemons. It's really no big deal, and it's pretty funny.
I have friends that are models. Heaven forbid they show even the barest bit of nipple. Sometimes it doesn't even take that much. They have pictures taken down and temp-bans put on them.
So my question is who are they employing to scan these images, and why do they find partially clothed women more offensive than pictures of exploited kids?