By Tian DuBelko
Even media giant Facebook is left scratching its head when it comes to policing disturbing content such as revenge porn and “sextortion” on its site.
According to The Guardian, the most popular social network handles up to 54,000 cases dealing with sexual abuse each month. Recently leaked documents revealed that Facebook’s moderators have struggled to handle the massive task of policing nude content and cases of sex abuse.
In January alone, Facebook had to disable over 14,000 accounts related to these types of sex abuse and 33 of the cases reviewed involved children. Earlier this month, Facebook hired 3,000 moderators to help with better oversight when it comes to pornographic content and sex abuse.
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4,500 employees already worked at Facebook, so his new hire is a big step the media company is taking in cracking down on offensive and disturbing content.
“Keeping people on Facebook safe is the most important thing we do,” said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook. “We work hard to make Facebook as safe as possible while enabling free speech.”
Facebook and other social networks and began seeing a proliferation of pornography as well as revenge porn and sextortion. Trying to contain these abusive and often illegal content has become one of the biggest challenges for all social media networks. Not only are they under political pressure to maintain a safe site for users, but there is the prospect of a large fine for allowing pornographic and sexually abusive images.
“Not all disagreeable or disturbing content violates our community standards,” said Facebook in a statement. “For this reason we offer people who use Facebook the ability to customize and control what they see by unfollowing, blocking or hiding posts, people, pages and applications they don’t want to see.
