How the fuck did Facebook get away with hosting images of child abuse?
I don’t want to sound like a Luddite, but social media companies like Facebook, X and Instagram really are cancers, aren’t they?
New technologies can be used for good, and the idea of using the internet to connect people is a good one at its core (kind of). However, so much of what makes the modern world feel like a kick in the ghoulies that for some reason lasts a lifetime can be traced back to social media waltzing into our lives and the people responsible for it going, “This is a nice world, I think we’ll take it!”
Seriously, it takes a lot for David Fincher’s masterpiece The Social Network to be too soft on its subjects. It is a film that, within two minutes, calls Mark Zuckerberg an asshole and spends the entire rest of its running time demonstrating why. Today, with the myriad evils of Zuckerberg and his Silicon Valley cronies contributing to the rot of modern society’s soul, it comes across like a puff piece compared to what these vermin deserve.
It’s got to the point where they’re so demonstrably responsible for so many societal ills that the only way their legion of boot-licking fanboys can respond to it is “well, it wasn’t their intention!!!” For one thing, it doesn’t matter if your intentions are good when you’re responsible for this much evil sweeping the Earth. For another, that implies that these companies aren’t doing anything actually bad, it’s merely a consequence of all their sweeping decision.
Like, nah, they know exactly what they’re doing, and we’ve known this for about ten years now.
Did Facebook know what they’re doing?
The year is 2017, and Facebook is still clinging onto relevancy as a social media network still used by anyone under the age of 30. In fact, it’s still (arguably) the biggest social media platform on the planet.
However, a horrifying news story is breaking about the fact that, despite these groups seemingly going against every term of service agreement Facebook offers, a number of groups dedicated to sharing sexualized images of children were still operational…and they weren’t being taken down.
These groups and images were unearthed as part of a BBC investigation into Facebook. To test how effective Facebook’s internal reporting system was, the journalists at first reported their findings directly to the company itself. They alerted the company to over 100 images they’d collected from Facebook depicting truly horrific things. From groups set up specifically for men with a sexual interest in children, to images taken of schoolchildren, to a still from a video that appeared to be depicting child abuse.
Facebook responded to this by requesting that the journalists send over these images for proof. When they did, Facebook then reported the journalists to the UK’s National Crime Agency for distributing child abuse imagery. Then, they only took down about 18 of the reported images. The other 82 “did not breach community standards” to them. This included the still image from the video. Facebook were held accountable to its own supposed standards and responded by saying, essentially, “Fuck you, we do what we want.”
They still do, and still will. There is quite simply nothing we can do about it.