Facebook reported BBC journalists to the police after they reported and provided examples of sexualised images of children discovered on Facebook’s private groups.
During the investigation, the BBC requested an interview from Facebook about its moderation system.
Simon Milner, Facbeook’s director of policy, agreed to be interviewed on condition the BBC provided examples of the material that they reported, but had not been removed by moderators.
The BBC journalists complied with Milner’s request, Facebook then reported the BBC to the UK’s National Crime Agency.
“It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation. When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry’s standard practice and reported them to CEOP [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre],” Facebook told Gizmodo in a statement.
“We also reported the child exploitation images that had been shared on our own platform. This matter is now in the hands of the authorities.”
To test Facebook’s claim, the BBC used the report button to alert the company to 100 images which appeared to break its guidelines. They included:
- pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children
- images of under-16s in highly sexualised poses, with obscene comments posted beside them
- groups with names such as “hot xxxx schoolgirls” containing stolen images of real children
- an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a request below it to share “child pornography”
Of the 100 images only 18 were removed.
