Anonymous Whistleblower: Facebook’s Response to Child Sexual Abuse Is ‘Inadequate’ and ‘Under-Resourced’

A former Facebook employee reportedly told U.S. authorities recently that the social media giant’s efforts to remove child sexual abuse material have been “inadequate” and “under-resourced.”

BBC News reports that a former Facebook employee has spoken with U.S. authorities about the company’s response to child sexual abuse material on its platform, calling it “inadequate” and “under-resourced.”

The whistleblower reportedly submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) two weeks ago and seen by the BBC. The whistleblower — who has remained anonymous — stated that Facebook moderators are “not sufficiently trained and are ill-prepared.”

In response, Facebook said in a statement: “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 anti-abuse technologies with other companies. In a sworn statement to the SEC, the anonymous whistleblower said that there was no solution in place to stop illegal material hosted on Facebook’s platform as the company did not have “adequate assets devoted to the problem.”

The whistleblower claims that a small team was formed to develop software that could detect child sexual abuse material on the platform and improve moderation, but it was broken up and redeployed as the project was seen as “too complex.”

Facebook says that it uses technology known as PhotoDNA and VideoDNA to scan for known child sexual abuse images. Images of child pornography recovered by law enforcement worldwide and referred to the American National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children are given unique identifier codes making it easier for automated systems to track the images online.

The whistleblower further alleged that Facebook is unaware of the scale of the issue of child sexual abuse on its platform as it “doesn’t track it” and that senior managers constantly questioned efforts to address the issue, asking “what’s the return on investment?”

Facebook is a known hotbed of child sexual abuse material, as previously reported by Breitbart News.

As reported in February:

The Daily Beast reports that according to new data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline, the vast majority of online child exploitation reports were linked to Facebook. The study found that over 20.3 million reported incidents related to child pornography or trafficking were linked to Facebook.

In comparison to the millions of incidents reported on Facebook, Google had 546,704 incidents, Twitter found 65,062, Snapchat reported 144,095, and TikTok found 22,692. Facebook accounted for almost 95 percent of the 21.7 million reports combined across all platforms.

Read more at BBC News here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact via secure email at the address lucasnolan@protonmail.com