The Beeb was godsmacked this week when Facebook reported some of their journalists to the UK’s National Crime Agency. The BBC journos, you see, were trying to get Facebook to do more to curb photos of sexualized children hosted on the social media site. But instead of explaining themselves on the record as the BBC had asked, Facebook counterattacked and reported the reporters to the authorities.
The BBC had published an expose on Facebook’s failure to remove these photos and deal with groups on the site who talked about “swapping” the child abuse material. They also ran tests on reporting this objectionable content and found Facebook did not remove over 80 percent of what they reported.
The journalists reached out to Facebook to schedule an interview last week. The social network’s director of policy Simon Milner agreed to interview on the condition the BBC would provide him with some of the child abuse photos they reported on in the earlier story. But when they did, Facebook reported the journalists to the UK’s National Crime Agency.
In a statement Facebook said:
We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards. This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures. It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation. When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry’s standard practice and reported them to Ceop [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre].
The BBC were flabbergasted by Facebook’s move, and their director of editorial policy speculated it may have been because the company was reluctant to do the interview.
The National Crime Agency has not confirmed if there is any investigation underway into the BBC.
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