Facebook wants victims of revenge porn to send them nude photos of themselves in a new test that’s attempting to crack down on illegal content on the platform.
According to Tech Crunch, “The strategy entails uploading your nude photos or videos to Messenger in order to help Facebook tag it as non-consensual explicit media.”
“Facebook is doing this in partnership with Australian government agency e-Safety in order to try to prevent people from sharing intimate images without consent. If someone fears they are at risk of revenge porn, they can contact e-Safety,” they explained. “The organization might then tell them to send a nude photo of themselves to themselves via Messenger. Facebook’s hashing system would then be able to recognize those images in the future without needing to store them on its servers.”
In an interview, e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman addressed privacy concerns, claiming, “They’re not storing the image, they’re storing the link and using artificial intelligence and other photo-matching technologies.”
“So if somebody tried to upload that same image, which would have the same digital footprint or hash value, it will be prevented from being uploaded,” she claimed.
In April, Facebook introduced an anti-revenge porn feature to their platform, creating a system to detect and block known illegal images. However, a May report indicated that the social network was “flooded” with cases of revenge porn and sextortion, with nearly 54,000 cases of the crime reported in just a month; 33 of which involved children.
Earlier this year, lawyer Daniel Szalkiewicz criticized social networks, and in particular Facebook, for having “broken” revenge porn policies.
“The service providers turn around and say ‘yes we removed the images’, but what they don’t do is remove the accounts,” Szalkiewicz proclaimed. “Let’s say someone created a fake Facebook account using my name, and they put my naked photographs up there. I report the naked photographs to Facebook, Facebook will take down the photographs, but they leave the fake account with my name up there.”
“Facebook is very difficult as well because they don’t provide you with a direct line of communication like Google Legal does,” he continued. “They make you sign on to the service, and then they make you report one of three things. If you’ve ever actually looked through the process, it’s very complicated and difficult.”
In one case, Tumblr allegedly took three weeks to get a sexually explicit video of a seventeen-year-old girl removed.
“What you find is that clients obviously don’t look at these websites; they don’t know whether somebody puts their photograph up online,” explained Szalkiewicz. “The way they find out is suddenly their inboxes are flooded with Facebook friend requests, flooded with Instagram requests, saying ‘we saw your photograph, do you want to be friends?’ And obviously a lot of perverts are requesting a lot of additional information from them, and trying to essentially hit on them.”
Last month, Twitter also vowed to crack down on revenge porn with a new set of rules, while this week, Uber announced their pledge of $5 million to sexual assault prevention groups.
Charlie Nash is a reporter for Breitbart Tech. You can follow him on Twitter @MrNashington and Gab @Nash, or like his page at Facebook.