Facebook accused of being lax on child porn
August 21, 2012
Facebook has been accused of allowing child pornography to
proliferate thanks to a new meme in which users, some of them underaged,
are encouraged to post naked pictures of themselves on the social
media platform.
Kate Drury, a member of informal watchdog group The Watchers, has
accused Facebook of allowing the creation and dissemination of child
pornography to go unchecked via a rash of pages using variations on the
"naked selfies" theme.
"These pages started a couple of weeks ago and there are clearly
underage children on there," Ms Drury said. "It's disgusting and it's
illegal, and these children need to understand that once it's up there
it's up forever."
Ms Drury has taken her concerns to Crime Stoppers, the Australian
Federal Police and the Australian Communications and Media Authority as
well as Facebook. She has had a response from the federal police and
the media authority has launched an investigation, but her emails to
Facebook have gone unanswered. However, she notes that about eight
pages have closed down in the past week.
However, others have sprung up in their place, often attracting
thousands of 'likes' within hours of going live. Fairfax Mediais aware
of at least 30 such pages on Facebook, some with almost 100,000 'likes'.
Some of the pages appear to be linked to users in Queensland, and
many feature images from a variety of sources. Some have clearly been
submitted by users, others have been lifted or republished from similar
pages on Tumblr, where the meme has been active for at least a year,
and yet others appear to have been lifted from pornographic sites.
Although female nudity is vastly more common, some contain images of
naked men, and others feature images of sexual intercourse.
All, says cyber safety expert Susan McLean, are in contravention of Facebook's "no nudity" policy.
"Images such as these immediately breach Facebook's terms and
conditions," McLean said from San Francisco, where she is due to meet
the company tomorrow (not specifically about this matter). "They've
ordered pictures of breastfeeding mothers to be taken down so these are
clearly a problem. I guarantee they will be gone very quickly."
McLean said she was generally satisfied that Facebook took such
matters seriously but the fact it operates reactively, requiring
members to complain before it will investigate, means it doesn't always
move as fast as it might on offending content.
But even if the pages do disappear, the images users have submitted
will linger on, somewhere. A commentator on one page invites users to
use a secure offsite storage facility for images of naked girlfriends
and exes. Others invite fans of such pages to join private groups
within Facebook, in the belief that they will then be free from the
constraints that can force public sites to close down.
McLean said there was a real possibility that some of the people
behind the pages are involved in the pornography business and are
actively sourcing images that will live on - on commercial porn sites.
Even if their intentions were less dubious, Ms McLean pointed out
that anyone who facilitated the publication of images of naked minors
could be prosecuted under anti-child pornography laws, even if they
hadn't posted the images themselves.
Nigel Phair, director of the Centre for Internet Safety at the
University of Canberra, said that some minors might be posting images
of themselves in the mistaken belief that it was a bit of harmless fun.
"The problem is they don't understand the implications. The web never
forgets," he said.
He suggested it was unlikely that anyone would be prosecuted over
such images, even though any minor who takes a photo of themselves
naked is technically producing child pornography.
"The difficult question is whose jurisdiction is it? That's often why people don't investigate," he said.
But, he added: "Facebook should be doing all they can to monitor
this sort of behaviour, and to assist law enforcement in such matters
if they want to maintain the trust and confidence of their users."
In a statement issued late yesterday, Facebook said it acts quickly
''to remove reported content that violates our policies.
Specifically, we're sensitive to content that includes pornography,
bullying, hate speech, and actionable threats of violence. Users can and
do report content that they find questionable or offensive. We
encourage people to report objectionable content to us so that we can
react as quickly as possible to review and take down inappropriate
material''.
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