Facebook Reports BBC to Police after Requesting Sexualised Pictures of Children

Zarathustra[H]

Zarathustra[H]

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So, let me see if I understand what happened here. The BBC was doing a story on how Facebook removes illegal an abusive images from its network. As part of this story, they noticed that some reported images had not been removed, so they reached out to Facebook for comment. Facebook responded by requesting examples of the images they were discussing, and when they received them and realized they were "sexualized images of children" they proceeded to report the BBC to the police?

I have to admit, I find this rather amusing, and my conclusion is that it must have been some sort of miscommunication at Facebook that resulted in the issue, but child pr0n is no laughing matter, and nor is, I presume, being accused of peddling child pr0n.

"As part of that investigation, the BBC claims that Facebook asked to see the pictures that were under discussion. When the BBC journalists sent them to the site, it said, Facebook reported the news organisation to the police and cancelled all of its interviews."
 
Facebook is definitely in the wrong here. The illegal pictures were originally posted on Facebook, and Facebook refused to remove them. When Facebook was confronted by reporters writing a story about these Facebook moderation failures, Facebook tried to deflect blame and absolve themselves of complicity.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I feel bad for the people whose job it is to sift through these videos/photos all day. Can you imagine the psychological impact?
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Ugh, yeah. I feel bad somehow just having to repost these stories. (I've only been doing this a short while and there have already been way too many child pr0n stories)

I can only imagine what that must be like.
 
Somehow I imagine that all kinds of bad stuff goes through Facebook and we'd all be horrified if some of the stuff was exposed.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I feel bad for the people whose job it is to sift through these videos/photos all day. Can you imagine the psychological impact?
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Depends on how you view it. You try not to connect with the victims but rather focus on the perpetrator and know that once you catch him he will be brought to justice. I don't know how much people get paid at public companies like Facebook or Google to sift through the stuff but I am sure it's not enough. At the US attorneys office they tend to rotate some of the prosecutors who work on such cases because it is psychologically stressful for most to be working those kind of cases for long periods of time.
 
NickJames said:
Depends on how you view it. You try not to connect with the victims but rather focus on the perpetrator and know that once you catch him he will be brought to justice. I don't know how much people get paid at public companies like Facebook or Google to sift through the stuff but I am sure it's not enough. At the US attorneys office they tend to rotate some of the prosecutors who work on such cases because it is psychologically stressful for most to be working those kind of cases for long periods of time.
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I don't know man. It isn't that easy to disconnect the act from the victim. The animal torture/rape/child porn stuff would do me in pretty damn quickly. I wouldn't last the week.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I don't know man. It isn't that easy to disconnect the act from the victim. It may sound callous, but the beheadings are one thing, the animal torture/rape/child porn stuff would do me in pretty damn quickly. I wouldn't last the week.
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It's definitely not for everyone, especially if you have children and it really gives you a jaded outlook on humanity. I worked in a section that dealt with it for about 6 years, although not as closely as attorneys do, and you see the mood difference between fresh passed the BAR and those who've worked 1 or 2 cases.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I feel bad for the people whose job it is to sift through these videos/photos all day. Can you imagine the psychological impact?
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I had a friend who tried to be a "Special Victims" cop for a while, he washed out after a couple of years. It was just too traumatizing. He is much happier as a standard detective.
 
So if this is true, how come when you testify to congress that you've seen child porn like in this video, nothing happens to you?
 
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jkw said:
Facebook is definitely in the wrong here. The illegal pictures were originally posted on Facebook, and Facebook refused to remove them. When Facebook was confronted by reporters writing a story about these Facebook moderation failures, Facebook tried to deflect blame and absolve themselves of complicity.
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Facebook may not actually be in the wrong. There's not enough details.

I have to deal with this type of crap with my job, I have friends who were IT for a boarding school full of bored problem rich girls who had to deal with it a LOT more.

See, if you report it, you don't have legal problems. It's unsolicited illegal shit on your systems, and you are just reporting the discovery. Once you KNOW you have it on your systems, not reporting it puts you in potential legal trouble.So you have a standard process, for example:

Find illegal shit, archive it in legal hold status, call appropriate reporting group/agency/department depending on the content and tell them who, what, where, and when.

So if the reporter sent a link or something, then the right thing would be to follow the process, and report the person they originated with.
If the reporter sent them copies in email with a description, guess what? You archive them, and report the person who mailed them to you.

Newsflash: being a reporter doesn't make possession and distribution of known kiddie porn NOT a crime. There may be qualified immunity for the police conducting investigations, stings, etc. And for prosecutors presenting evidence, but as a reporter you are not granted some magic exemption. If you were, the kiddie porn people would just start funding small papers and all work there investigating kiddie porn 24-7.
 
raz-0 has a point. Its up to police to follow the bread crumbs, hopefully back to the piece of human garbage.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I feel bad for the people whose job it is to sift through these videos/photos all day. Can you imagine the psychological impact?
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I would imagine they should have a rotating team to handle things like this, like how the French rotated soldiers in and out of Verdun. Do it for a little while and then get them out before, hopefully, it all becomes too much.
 
Sulphademus said:
I would imagine they should have a rotating team to handle things like this, like how the French rotated soldiers in and out of Verdun. Do it for a little while and then get them out before, hopefully, it all becomes too much.
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Judging by the failure rate of them not removing actual bad content, I wouldn't be surprised if they are trying to do it via some sort of machine learning algorithm first, to spare actual people having to look at that shit, and that the actual people only wind up involved as a last resort.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
So if this is true, how come when you testify to congress that you've seen child porn like in this video, nothing happens to you?
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Legit question, anyone know the answer? I mean, how the heck did he even FIND that video. I'm on the internet all the time, you don't just stumble on that while checking your gmail or facebook. Secondly, after about 42 minutes in, did he finally decide, hey maybe I shouldn't be watching this, and report it immediately to the authorities?
 
raz-0 said:
Facebook may not actually be in the wrong. There's not enough details.

I have to deal with this type of crap with my job, I have friends who were IT for a boarding school full of bored problem rich girls who had to deal with it a LOT more.

See, if you report it, you don't have legal problems. It's unsolicited illegal shit on your systems, and you are just reporting the discovery. Once you KNOW you have it on your systems, not reporting it puts you in potential legal trouble.So you have a standard process, for example:

Find illegal shit, archive it in legal hold status, call appropriate reporting group/agency/department depending on the content and tell them who, what, where, and when.

So if the reporter sent a link or something, then the right thing would be to follow the process, and report the person they originated with.
If the reporter sent them copies in email with a description, guess what? You archive them, and report the person who mailed them to you.

Newsflash: being a reporter doesn't make possession and distribution of known kiddie porn NOT a crime. There may be qualified immunity for the police conducting investigations, stings, etc. And for prosecutors presenting evidence, but as a reporter you are not granted some magic exemption. If you were, the kiddie porn people would just start funding small papers and all work there investigating kiddie porn 24-7.
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I think we do have enough details to blame facebook. As outlined in my original post, the images were first reported to facebook and facebook did nothing. It was only when facebook was notified that an article was being written about their failure to address child porn that they acted.

fwiw, I have worked on the LEO, social media provider, and AV vendor sides of the child porn issue. This is a difficult issue on many levels. Bottom line though is that facebook ignored the child porn reports until it became a PR problem for them. Facebook should have addressed it sooner. The facebook content reporting system is broken because they allow all sorts of questionable and illegal content until they are forced to take action. Google did *exactly* the same thing with orkut and the Brazilian child porn scandal.
 
Ducman69 said:
Legit question, anyone know the answer? I mean, how the heck did he even FIND that video. I'm on the internet all the time, you don't just stumble on that while checking your gmail or facebook. Secondly, after about 42 minutes in, did he finally decide, hey maybe I shouldn't be watching this, and report it immediately to the authorities?
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It's all over newsgroups, dark web, and foreign websites, among other places. One of the reasons why tor is compromised and the feds refuse to release details, is so they can continue to conduct investigations into child porn.

btw, I would of course strongly caution against looking for it. In addition to being illegal and stupid, you'll very possibly wind up accessing an FBI child porn sting server.
 
jkw said:
btw, I would of course strongly caution against looking for it.
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That's the key though, I think you really have to go out of your way to find this kind of stuff, so what is Ashton's excuse?

"I... I was really looking for UNRELATED types of rare illegal porn involving the rape of endangered animals in Cambodia, and I stumbled onto this horrific child porn... I'm traumatized!" - Ashton, probably

Its not like he was shopping for tennis shoes, clicked the thumbnail of a pair of Nikes, and blamo! Right? Fishy.
 
Ducman69 said:
I'm on the internet all the time, you don't just stumble on that while checking your gmail or facebook.
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It is possible to make innocent boneheaded moves like - for instance - googling for a certain 1962 Stanley Kubrick film by title, and I wouldn't be surprised if you are into small chested women, there are a lot of search terms there that can lead to inadvertent underage images and videos.

My Brazilian future mother in-law recently did something like this when trying to find a recipe for a cream pie. Boy was she surprised.

And then there's stuff like this:



Not all of this stuff is intentional.
 
Zarathustra[H] said:
My Brazilian future mother in-law recently did something like this when trying to find a recipe for a cream pie. Boy was she surprised.
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Omg..just omg that had to have been hysterical.

FB really went full retard here. As the BBC very specifically stated, the FB rep made it a condition of the interview that they share what they found in advance. Then they report a BBC reporter...for reporting illicit images to Facebook? Then don't admit anything and put out a corporatespeak press release that they followed "industry standards". Right...it's definitely industry standard to report reporters reporting they found crap on your site.

Next, FB will be reporting the police to the police for asking about the images, because that makes sense too right?
 
Hypergreatthing said:
So if this is true, how come when you testify to congress that you've seen child porn like in this video, nothing happens to you?
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The laws on things like this can be really complex. It could have been evidence or it could have been something someone had in another country, etc.
 
that kid one was funny (why was it not filtering stuff like that out on alexa)
 
likeman said:
that kid one was funny (why was it not filtering stuff like that out on alexa)
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You can't pull up porn on Alexa, and what happened was a fluke and since fixed.

Alexa was searching Spotify and came up with the match for "Comedy Ring Tones", of which the result was a gag one that says "warning, warning, too much porn detected on this device" and other embarrassing pranks you'd do on a friend that left their phone unlocked. The creator of that filled up the "search terms" to include all the profanity that was spoken out by Alexa.

WHY did Alexa think "digger digger" had anything to do with that? Because it thought he said "Play Dildo Dildo" because the little shit can't pronounce anything worth a damn and was shouting from about one inch into a very sensitive microphone, and "dildo dildo" on Spotify brought up the closest keyword match it could find.

Crap in - Crap out.
 
NeoNemesis said:
I don't know man. It isn't that easy to disconnect the act from the victim. The animal torture/rape/child porn stuff would do me in pretty damn quickly. I wouldn't last the week.
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When you see horrible things every day, after a while you become sort of numb to it, unless you see something that triggers you personally (such as child sexual abuse does to me, I've come close to assaulting a couple of people who I was pretty damn sure were abusing their kids, but instead managed to just keep them in the e.r. long enough to get the police involved). Seeing the worst human behavior on an every day basis is why cops have such a high burn out rate.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
So if this is true, how come when you testify to congress that you've seen child porn like in this video, nothing happens to you?
Click to expand...

Pedogate is why as it involves many on both sides, beyond that too - the well is deep.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
So if this is true, how come when you testify to congress that you've seen child porn like in this video, nothing happens to you?
Click to expand...


Because he setup a foundation dedicated to ending human trafficking.
He is watching it the same reason the police do, (hopefully) to catch the bad guys.
 
jkw said:
I think we do have enough details to blame facebook. As outlined in my original post, the images were first reported to facebook and facebook did nothing. It was only when facebook was notified that an article was being written about their failure to address child porn that they acted.

fwiw, I have worked on the LEO, social media provider, and AV vendor sides of the child porn issue. This is a difficult issue on many levels. Bottom line though is that facebook ignored the child porn reports until it became a PR problem for them. Facebook should have addressed it sooner. The facebook content reporting system is broken because they allow all sorts of questionable and illegal content until they are forced to take action. Google did *exactly* the same thing with orkut and the Brazilian child porn scandal.
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Yeah but that's not what is being reported and promoted. What is being reported and promoted is the facebook were big meanies for reporting the BBC journalist. That's the focus, and it likely bullshit form many angles and actually detracts from the real issue which is that their reporting mechanism is craptastic.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
But he's not police and just an ordinary citizen.
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It is entirely possible they are working with law enforcement in an official capacity and thus have some degree of qualified immunity. For example, if they send out kiddie pron pics to a lab for analysis of the image (real, fake, identifying the location via background contents, etc. ), the lab doesn't get in trouble for mailing them back or having them. This is why I said the journalist doesn't automatically get immunity form having and diseminating kiddie porn. They MIGHT have jumped through the right hoops to do so. They also might not have.
 
Try being a police officer or in EMS for a while and you will see plenty of this sort of abuse and it will stick with you. I think people caught with this sort of material should be tortured and killed on the spot.
 
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