Former Facebook Censor Became ‘Desensitized’ to Child Porn

A former Facebook content censor claims she became “desensitized” to graphic content on the platform, which included child porn featuring children between the ages of nine and twelve.

Sarah Katz, who was employed by Facebook in 2016, worked as one of the many employees whose job is to sort through reported content and decide whether or not it should be removed.
According to Business Insider, employees sorted through as many as 8,000 posts a day, which they were expected to make a decision on in a matter of seconds.
“Facebook has billions of users and people don’t know how to use the platform correctly. So there was a lot of pornography, bestiality, graphic violence… There was a lot of content that you might not expect to see shared on Facebook,” Katz claimed. “It’s kind of a monotonous job after a while. You definitely grow desensitized to some of the graphic material because you see so much of it. A lot of the content tends to recirculate.”

One example which Katz repeatedly saw was a video featuring two children between the ages of nine and twelve, who were “standing facing each other, wearing nothing below the waist, and touching each other.”

“It would go away and come back, it would appear at multiple times of the day. Each time the user location would be different. One day shared from Pakistan, another day the US. It’s kinda hard to track down the initial source,” Katz explained, adding that she was “disturbed” when Facebook told her not to remove the accounts sharing such material.

“If the user’s account was less than 30 days old we would deactivate the account as a fake account. If the account was older than 30 days we would simply remove the content and leave the account active,” she declared. “There needs to be many human eyes to do the job and it cannot all be allocated to artificial intelligence, no matter how much folks say… We will always be that nuance of human perspective.”

In February, the FBI warned Facebook users not to share child pornography posted online.

Though many users were sharing child pornography videos in an attempt to catch the abusers or get the video taken down, officials warned that those who share the content are committing a crime.

In March, Facebook was criticized for distributing a survey which asked users whether adults should be able to request sexual content from children on the social network.