Facebook is stepping up its efforts to battle revenge porn, a form of online harassment.
The social media giant said in a blog post Wednesday that once a revenge-porn picture is reported and removed, new artificial intelligence photo-matching technologies are used to prevent that same image from being posted on Facebook Messenger and Instagram.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote on his Facebook page that sharing intimate photos online, as a means of shaming an individual is “wrong, it’s hurtful, and if you report it to us, we will now use AI and image recognition to prevent it from being shared across all of our platforms.”
Facebook recently started flagging so-called “disputed news” items that appear on its platform after concerns were raised about the website’s role in inadvertently helping proliferate fake news among its users.
In her blog post, Facebook head of global safety Antigone Davis wrote “these tools, developed in partnership with safety experts, are one example of the potential technology has to help keep people safe.” Some of those experts include the National Network to End Domestic Violence, Center for Social Research and the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which offers on how to counter revenge porn.
The post explained that the first step in the process requires the offending photo to be flagged by clicking on the “Report” link that is accessed by clicking on the arrow near a post. One of the options for why a given post is problematic is “nude photo of me.”
Then a Community Operations team member reviews the request, and if it is deemed inappropriate, the photo is removed and blocked from appearing on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram.
If the poster tries to surface the photo again, they’re contacted by Facebook and warned that it violates their terms of service.
Currently, 35 states and Washington, D.C., in the USA have laws against online harassment, but there is no federal law against the practice.
Last year’s Data & Society Research Institute poll found that people ages 15 to 29 are most likely to report being threatened with the potential sharing of nude or nearly nude images, with 7% of Internet users under the age of 30 experiencing this compared with 2% of adults ages 30 and older.
Woman are particularly vulnerable, with one in 10 under the age of 30 having experienced threats of nonconsensual image sharing.
