A former Facebook employee has told US authorities that the company’s efforts to remove child abuse material from the platform were “inadequate” and “under-resourced”.
The allegations are contained in documents submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) two weeks ago.
The anonymous whistleblower said that moderators are “not sufficiently trained and are ill prepared”.
Facebook made a statement in response to the allegations: “We have no tolerance for this abhorrent abuse of children and use sophisticated technologies to combat it. We’ve funded and helped build the tools used by industry to investigate this terrible crime, rescue children and bring justice to victims.” Facebook added that it has shared its anti-abuse technology with other companies.
The latest revelations came from an unnamed whistleblower, with inside knowledge of the teams within Facebook set up to intercept harmful material. In a sworn statement to the SEC, which regulates securities markets and protect investors, the individual said that there was solution to illegal material at Facebook because there had not been “adequate assets devoted to the problem”.
They claim that a small team set up to develop software that could detect indecent videos of children was broken up and redeployed because it was seen as “too complex”.
Other accusations from the whistleblower include:
- Facebook doesn’t know the full scale of the problem of child abuse material because it “doesn’t track it”
- A constant question allegedly asked by senior managers was “what’s the return on investment?”
Sir Peter Wanless, chief executive of the NSPCC, said: “These revelations raise profound and disturbing questions about Facebook’s commitment to combat illegal child abuse on its services.
“For the first time, evidence from inside Facebook suggests they have abdicated their responsibility to comprehensively tackle child sexual abuse material”. The former employee concluded their statement by writing: “Unless there is…the credible threat of legislative and/or legal action. Facebook won’t change”.
Sources: BBC, Press News Agency
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