4 ms·

Facebook Reported 20M Instances of Child Sexual Abuse in 2020

22 points by elsewhen 6y ago

kumarvvr 6y ago
Not far fetched to imagine FB using info like this for blackmail.
- brockwhittaker 6y ago
  Yes it is.
  - meepmorp 6y ago
    No, no, big public businesses like facebook routinely use evidence of child sexual abuse to coerce adults into doing their nefarious bidding. The complete lack of evidence is in itself proof of how effective their methods have been!
- sir_bearington 6y ago
  It is pretty far fetched. Think about the value proposition vs the risk of exposure of such a scheme. Blackmail is a major felony, and deliberately choosing not to report illegal content of this nature is as well. Why would Facebook do this when they are already swimming in ad revenue?
mc32 6y ago
I’d love to see the same outrage energy and money directed elsewhere directed to fighting this scourge. It affects all classes of people -bar none. I want to see marches. I want to see demands. I want to see sit ins. Denouncements. New curriculums, HR initiatives, Training, etc. I’m afraid there is no money to be made.
- jjk166 6y ago
  What shortage of outrage, energy and money is there? What necessary action is not being taken which you want people to demand? I struggle to think of a single issue with more universal public support at all levels of society. But there isn't really a way to prevent an unknown and variable group of people from sharing an unknown and variable set of files over an unknown and variable set of communication channels.
  - mc32 6y ago
    Abuse comes in a many forms. That is all but one. See young athletes, actors, actresses, pupils, summer camps, etc. Where are the hashtags, the calling out of people who harm, where is the teacher training and extirpation of those who pray on the vulnerable within their ranks? Where are the Twitter bans, etc.
    - jjk166 6y ago
      The hashtags, the public shaming, the teacher training, etc all already exist. But child sexual abusers go to great lengths to hide their activities and even their victims more often than not don't want to talk publicly about what happened to them. Again, you can't take action against people you can't identify, and I don't think we want to encourage people to start throwing unsubstantiated accusations of child sexual abuse at people, nor present evidence of a child's sexual abuse on public forums.
      - mc32 6y ago
        I dunno about you, but I haven’t had any mandatory training assigned by HR. There is sexual harassment training but that’s the extent. I can see them teaching the psychology. How to recognize signs, how to get people to turn themselves in for treatment if that’s the case, how to reach out to professionals if one was a victim, etc. Nope, I haven’t seen national campaigns against it. I have not seen billionaires pour their money into prominent causes. I don’t see celebrities denouncing this scourge at every occasion.
- mindslight 6y ago
  It's much easier to police patterns of bits while pretending to fight child abuse, as we have here. Notice how the article says nothing regarding results of having caught or stopped any actual abusers.
im3w1l 6y ago
These numbers are just mindboggling
Imnimo 6y ago
>John Clark, president and CEO of NCMEC, told Motherboard that in 2020, 10.4 million of the nearly 21,500,000 reports were unique images that were identified and reported multiple times >"We found that more than 90 percent of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content," Hard to tell where exactly this falls between the extremes of "a few images being shared widely and reported many times" and "20M unique instances of abuse". Obviously it's neither of those, and there is a subset of images that account for many reports, but is there a long tail of unique instances? I don't feel like I have a good handle on what the scope of the problem is from the numbers and descriptions given in teh article.
jjk166 6y ago
Title is inaccurate - Facebook made 20M reports, it didn't report 20M unique instances. > "We found that more than 90 percent of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content," Facebook's blog post states. "And copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half of the child exploitative content we reported in that time period." It's a subtle but important distinction. We want the number or reports to be high - it means the methods in place are effective at catching what's out there.

22 points by elsewhen 6y ago

kumarvvr 6y ago

Not far fetched to imagine FB using info like this for blackmail.

brockwhittaker 6y ago
Yes it is.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  No, no, big public businesses like facebook routinely use evidence of child sexual abuse to coerce adults into doing their nefarious bidding. The complete lack of evidence is in itself proof of how effective their methods have been!
sir_bearington 6y ago
It is pretty far fetched. Think about the value proposition vs the risk of exposure of such a scheme. Blackmail is a major felony, and deliberately choosing not to report illegal content of this nature is as well. Why would Facebook do this when they are already swimming in ad revenue?

mc32 6y ago

I’d love to see the same outrage energy and money directed elsewhere directed to fighting this scourge. It affects all classes of people -bar none. I want to see marches. I want to see demands. I want to see sit ins. Denouncements. New curriculums, HR initiatives, Training, etc. I’m afraid there is no money to be made.

jjk166 6y ago
What shortage of outrage, energy and money is there? What necessary action is not being taken which you want people to demand? I struggle to think of a single issue with more universal public support at all levels of society. But there isn't really a way to prevent an unknown and variable group of people from sharing an unknown and variable set of files over an unknown and variable set of communication channels.
- mc32 6y ago
  Abuse comes in a many forms. That is all but one. See young athletes, actors, actresses, pupils, summer camps, etc. Where are the hashtags, the calling out of people who harm, where is the teacher training and extirpation of those who pray on the vulnerable within their ranks? Where are the Twitter bans, etc.
  - jjk166 6y ago
    The hashtags, the public shaming, the teacher training, etc all already exist. But child sexual abusers go to great lengths to hide their activities and even their victims more often than not don't want to talk publicly about what happened to them. Again, you can't take action against people you can't identify, and I don't think we want to encourage people to start throwing unsubstantiated accusations of child sexual abuse at people, nor present evidence of a child's sexual abuse on public forums.
    - mc32 6y ago
      I dunno about you, but I haven’t had any mandatory training assigned by HR. There is sexual harassment training but that’s the extent. I can see them teaching the psychology. How to recognize signs, how to get people to turn themselves in for treatment if that’s the case, how to reach out to professionals if one was a victim, etc. Nope, I haven’t seen national campaigns against it. I have not seen billionaires pour their money into prominent causes. I don’t see celebrities denouncing this scourge at every occasion.
mindslight 6y ago
It's much easier to police patterns of bits while pretending to fight child abuse, as we have here. Notice how the article says nothing regarding results of having caught or stopped any actual abusers.

im3w1l 6y ago

These numbers are just mindboggling

Imnimo 6y ago

>John Clark, president and CEO of NCMEC, told Motherboard that in 2020, 10.4 million of the nearly 21,500,000 reports were unique images that were identified and reported multiple times >"We found that more than 90 percent of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content," Hard to tell where exactly this falls between the extremes of "a few images being shared widely and reported many times" and "20M unique instances of abuse". Obviously it's neither of those, and there is a subset of images that account for many reports, but is there a long tail of unique instances? I don't feel like I have a good handle on what the scope of the problem is from the numbers and descriptions given in teh article.

jjk166 6y ago

Title is inaccurate - Facebook made 20M reports, it didn't report 20M unique instances. > "We found that more than 90 percent of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content," Facebook's blog post states. "And copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half of the child exploitative content we reported in that time period." It's a subtle but important distinction. We want the number or reports to be high - it means the methods in place are effective at catching what's out there.