Facebook Filled With Disturbing and Vengeful Photos

It seems that the social media giant is filled with approximately 50.000 potential cases of revenge pornography. According to a leaked document, the 50.000 potential cases were published on the site in a single month.

The Guardian revealed some interesting details about the social media company's guidelines related to content moderation, which apply to disturbing problems, including hate speech, violence, spreadsheets, self-harm, and many other things.

The leaked document revealed how Facebook decided to deal with this large number of disturbing content. It seems that the tech giant is trying to balance these cases, taking down content, but holding its preferred line on “free speech.”

This move also explains why Facebook is still dealing with moderation problems. It seems that Facebook still has a small number of people it employs to judge flagged content or review it.

The leaked document also shows that the tech giant allows sharing photos of non-sexual child abuse, for example bullying. Unfortunately, Facebook will only mark or remove content if there is a sadistic or celebratory element.

Facebook is also very forgiving with animal cruelty. This means that the internal moderation employees will not remove photos with people who are hurting animals, unless these photos are “extremely upsetting.”

“We constantly review and improve our policies,” has declared head of global policy management at Facebook, Monika Bickert. “These are complex areas but we are determined to get it right.”

Unfortunately, Facebook declined to comment the figures in the leaked document.

“We receive millions of reports each week but we do not release individual figures,” Facebook declared.

Another concerning thing is that Facebook permits users to live stream attempts to self-harm, claiming that it “doesn’t want to censor or punish people in distress.” When it comes to violence, it seems that the tech giant allows videos of violent deaths to be shared. However, the company marks this content as disturbing.

When it comes to revenge pornography, Facebook has some interesting guidelines. For this type of content, people will have to check three conditions that Facebook has posed.

We are talking about the fact that the moderator will be able to “confirm” consent via a “vengeful context.” According to the leaked document posted by The Guardian, Facebook had approximately 50.000 potential cases of revenge porn in a month. This reveal of internal rules comes when Facebook suffers a huge amount of pressure for the decisions it makes on content moderation.

On the other side, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, wrote a statement responding to the Guardian’s review, declaring that:

“Keeping people on Facebook safe is the most important thing we do. We work hard to make Facebook as safe as possible while enabling free speech. This requires a lot of thought into detailed and often difficult questions, and getting it right is something we take very seriously.  

Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that over the next year, we’ll be adding 3,000 people to our community operations team around the world — on top of the 4,500 we have today — to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly.”

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