Facebook has a no tolerance policy when it comes to posts that violate their community policies regarding child exploitation and in the last quarter alone the company has removed over 8.7 million posts that indicated child abuse.
According to the company, 99% of these posts that violated their child nudity or sexual exploitation of children policies were removed before anyone reported them.
This data goes to show that although a taboo, the practice of child pornography is prevalent in our society and even on Facebook, which the company is trying to fight.
Facebook uses a combination of photo-matching technology, artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to detect any posts indicating child nudity when it’s uploaded.
The company then reports these violations to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
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The social networking giant also keeps a tab on the Facebook accounts that interact with such posts and remove them to prevent encouraging such behaviour on their platform.
“Our Community Standards ban child exploitation and to avoid even the potential for abuse, we take action on nonsexual content as well, like seemingly benign photos of children in the bath,” said Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety, Facebook.
Facebook collaborates with safety experts, NGOs and other companies like in the Tech Coalition, Internet Watch Foundation and WeProtect Global Alliance to prevent and stop the spread of child exploitation online.
“For years our work has included using photo-matching technology to stop people from sharing known child exploitation images, requiring children to be at least 13 to use our services, and limiting the people that teens can interact with after they sign up.”
As much as we despise and prevent talking about it, Child pornography is widespread on the Internet and for influential social media companies like Facebook to take such steps in helping to prevent it is laudable and respectable.
Facebook will also be collaborating with Microsoft and other industry leaders to build tools for smaller companies to help them prevent this horrific but prevalent practice from spreading and putting an end to it eventually.