Facebook Says Page With Thousands Of Followers Filled With Graphic Images Of Children Doesn’t Violate Community Standards
Update: Facebook finally took the page down after hundreds of people received messages back from FB telling them that the page did not violate the community standards. This is what it used to look like.
A police officer alerted me last night to the existence of a Facebook page that has been up for several weeks, has thousands of followers, and features several disturbing images of naked boys. I won’t post the graphic images on this blog, but the page is still up as of this moment. Many of the images seems to be the same boys, and appear on the page called “Marri & his company.”
The comments are filled with comments from pedophiles, most of who are using fake names or are foreign.
Some, like Henry Wagner Sr. of Cabazon, CA, use their real names.
Henry’s friends list is filled with real people, including several family members, but he is also friends with accounts showing half naked boys.
And he likes a plethora of pages just like that.
I reported the page yesterday (and recorded myself reporting specific pictures with naked kids for evidence, but I’m not posting it here), but according to Facebook the images do not violate Facebook’s standards.
The police officer I spoke with tried it too and got the same result.
I searched for the page on Facebook and saw lots of other people got the same thing.
According to Facebook executive Monika Bickert, the multi-billion dollar tech company hired employees specifically to stop images like this from appearing on their platform:
In recent months, Facebook has said multiple times it would be hiring 20,000 safety and security employees during the course of this year. As of July 24, the company confirmed it had hired 15,000 of the 20,000 employees it plans to recruit.
The content review teams include a combination of full-time employees, contractors and partner-companies located around the world, along with 27 third-party fact-checking partnerships in 17 countries. In addition to human reviews, Facebook uses AI and machine learning tech to identify harmful content.
“We’re also investing heavily in new technology to help deal with problematic content on Facebook more effectively. For example, we now use technology to assist in sending reports to reviewers with the right expertise, to cut out duplicate reports, and to help detect and remove terrorist propaganda and child sexual abuse images before they’ve even been reported,” wrote Facebook’s VP of global policy management, Monika Bickert, on July 17.
Facebook’s content review employees undergo pre-training, hands-on learning and ongoing coaching during their employment. The company says it also has four clinical psychologists on staff, spread across three regions, to design and evaluate resiliency programs for employees tasked with reviewing graphic and objectionable content.
Facebook insists that they are a platform, not a publisher, and as such they receive immunity from liability for things the third parties post on their site. However, by making editorial decisions to allow posts like this to remain on their platform they are acting as publishers, not platforms. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley has claimed in June of last year that he intends on eliminating Facebook’s legal protections, but thus far nothing has come from it.
The entire moderation process of these big tech companies is shrouded in secrecy because they refuse to make their protocols public. If tech giants want to keep their government-granted immunity they must bring transparency and accountability to their editorial processes.
— Senator Hawley Press Office (@SenHawleyPress) June 20, 2019
If Facebook continues to receive the benefits of platform immunity then they should act as a platform. But since they act as a publisher they should be legally responsible, especially since they publicly insist that human beings are making these decisions, and thus can’t blame it on computer error.
Of course turtle riders know by now that Facebook is lying when they claim that human beings review reported posts. Instead, they allow mobs of activists to organize mass reporting campaigns that can take down any page they don’t like by triggering AI that removes content. We have had over 40 Facebook pages removed, including our biggest page with 112,000 followers, been suspended dozens of times, had pages shadow banned, and have spoken with Facebook’s attorneys who promised us this would not happen again. Clearly none of these alleged infractions violate Facebook’s terms of service.
But child pornography is allowed to stay up while “peace, love, and happiness to all” gets taken down on Christmas day.
I stopped complaining about Facebook censorship while ago because it’s just not productive. Conservatives love to whine about Facebook and tech censorship, but no one ever takes legal action or tries to get laws passed to declare platform access as a civil right. But I’ve never seen a page as egregious as this one before, and unless Facebook is above the law they should be held accountable for making the editorial decision to allow this to be published on their website.
I urge you all to report this page by clicking here, and if you get a notification from Facebook like the one I received, please screenshot it and sent it to Clarence Woods Emerson on Facebook.
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