Facebook won’t censor abuse and violence
By Christopher Hope
and Kate Mccann FACEBOOK is refusing to delete videos and images of “violent death”, abortion and self-harm because it does not want to censor its users, it emerged last night.
The American social media giant’s ethical guidelines, which were leaked to The Guardian newspaper, revealed that it has instructed staff not to remove controversial content that many would find deeply offensive.
The disclosures will add to a growing political row over Facebook’s responsibility to remove offensive material. Theresa May said last week she would bring in new powers to force companies like Facebook to explain why they have failed to remove harmful content.
Last night the leaked documents revealed that Facebook moderators – of which there are only 4,500 to police the accounts of nearly 2billion users – are instructed to delete controversial material only in certain circumstances.
The Guardian said it had seen more than 100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts on how Facebook moderates issues such as violence, hate speech, pornography and racism. Videos of abortions were allowed, the documents claimed, as long as there is no nudity, while the website will allow people to livestream self-harm because it “doesn’t want to censor or punish people in distress”.
Another document said all “handmade” art showing nudity and sexual activity is allowed but digitally made art showing sexual activity is not.
Photos of animal abuse could also be shared, with only extremely upsetting imagery to be marked as “disturbing”.
Types of remarks that could be permitted included: “Little girl needs to keep to herself before daddy breaks her face,” and “I hope someone kills you”. In one of the leaked documents, Facebook acknowledged “people use violent language” and feel “safe to do so”.
It said: “We should say that violent language is most often not credible until specificity of language gives us a reasonable ground to accept that there is no longer simply an expression of emotion but a transition to a plot or design.”
Labour’s Yvette Cooper, who chaired the home affairs select committee in the last parliament, said the leaks “show why we were right to call on social media companies to urgently review their community guidelines as too much harmful and dangerous content is getting through”. She said: “[Violent] images should be given to the police and removed. Facebook are getting this wrong and need to urgently change.”
Tim Loughton, a former Tory minister who also sat on the committee, added: “This appears to show that Facebook’s control over content on its platform is in complete chaos. Clearly they need to clarify the rules of what is ‘in’ or what is ‘out’ and make sure they have sufficient moderator capacity to implement it transparently and fairly.”
Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, said: “Keeping people on Facebook safe is the most important thing we do.”
She said that over the next year Facebook would take on 3,000 more moderators “to review the millions of reports we get every week, and improve the process for doing it quickly”.
She added: “In addition to investing in more people, we’re also building better tools to keep our community safe. We’re going to make it simpler to report problems to us, faster for our reviewers to determine which posts violate our standards and easier for them to contact law enforcement if someone needs help.”