
Facebook flooded with 'sextortion' and revenge porn, files reveal - daenney
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/may/22/facebook-flooded-with-sextortion-and-revenge-porn-files-reveal
======
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388102](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14388102)

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rburhum
I had a female friend last month whose ex-bf created a fake account and
proceeded to set the profile and public photos and videos of them (having
sex). He then went ahead and started sending friend requests to her entire
family and friends. I felt so bad for her - it was awful enough to make her
even have suicide thoughts.

What really surprised me was how horrible the FB system to report stuff like
this is. It is basically non-existant. If this thing takes 1 month to be
reviewed, that is 1 (eternal) month where the damage can be irreversible.

what is worse is that FB has posts about how they are "fighting" this without
having any instructions or obvious process defined to report this. So you
"report inappropriate content" and the report goes to a black hole while the
perpetrator continues with their shenanigans. They dont even need to create a
new acct, because they can keep going without the offending account getting
blocked.

Something else is that the non-profit foundations that exist to fight this
(the ones that will send legal take-down notices) are US-centric. This means
that if you are from a latin american country and you face this (as was this
particular case), you are screwed.

Yes obviously the lesson is not to take pics like that in the first place, but
sadly a lot of the victims may not be that computer savvy or mature enough to
realize what a mistake those things can be.

~~~
orblivion
This guy is in the videos as well, right? Could she somehow strike back harder
and demolish his reputation? Tell his friends and family, and his employer,
what he did to her? Who the hell would send a video of themselves having sex
with someone to that person's family?

~~~
jacksnipe
Unfortunately, in a lot of cultures and environments today (where culture is
not only your global, national, or regional culture, but also the culture that
you choose to surround yourself with), this kind of thing is much more
devastating for women than for men.

~~~
orblivion
I'm not saying that the existence of porn is supposed to hurt his reputation.
I'm saying the fact that he would violate somebody in this way should hurt his
reputation. The porn is just evidence of his doing this. I'm in no way trying
to diminish this lady's situation. On the contrary, it makes me angry and I
would want to see this guy see some serious consequences for it.

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ShannonAlther
> "54,000 potential cases... and 33 of the cases reviewed involved children."

That's 0.06% of reviewed cases, which is frankly less than I would have
thought. I suspect that child abusers are a more savvy lot than the average
chucklehead who does something like this.

~~~
LordKano
I'd imagine that the low hanging fruits are picked off by law enforcement
pretty quickly.

~~~
lostlogin
While others drag on for decades with establishment involvement - the U.K.
being the current but not first example.

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leggomylibro
It's disappointing, but not super surprising.

Shit like this is why I'd never want to operate a site with a large user base
that can freely upload content. Sure you could probably afford the servers for
awhile with minimal monetization, but could you pay for even a half-dozen
policy experts to moderate the content to a point where you don't send your
largest potential audiences running screaming for the hills?

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sergers
I am surprised their system for catching bad content is only user
reports/flags.

While revenge porn and stuff is bad, there are a number of known child related
incidents.

So if a private group of scumbags, are posting stuff to a private group, noone
will know unless someone within reports.

Who needs the darkweb when u can have a private Facebook group?

Edit: as per replies below, they do use image recognition aswell for I guess
known content lists

~~~
arkitaip
They also use image recognition to detect nudity and previously classified
child porn.

~~~
lightedman
No, they use Magic Number among a bunch of various tricks. You can't really
call it image recognition, more like 'data-hash comparison.' To train true
image recognition would require a LARGE subset of stored illegal pornography.

~~~
salmonfamine
What do you mean by "Magic Number" in this context?

~~~
rarepostinlurkr
It's in the file format

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures)

Also check out "libmagic"

------
nsaslideface
Some problems run deeper than their individual manifestations such as these
for which one may propose techie solutions -- here, sex ed is the only
permanent solution. It's time to find ways to explain to boys that sex is an
ordinary way to have fun and/or connect romantically between adult people,
rather than a source or arena of power or status as it is endlessly portrayed
in media.

~~~
eternalvision
Sex and power/status are inextricably linked for much of society.

~~~
eternalban
Society implies culture thus construct whereas this feature is observed in
much (all?) of animal kingdom as well.

------
frgtpsswrdlame
>and the challenges for moderators, who say they are overwhelmed by the volume
of work, which means they often have “just 10 seconds” to make a decision.

Maybe Facebook should just hire more moderators? I know they'd love to totally
relegate this to some awesome NLP algorithm but we're not there yet. Facebook
makes more than enough money to bring on some more employees (and clean up
their guidelines).

EDIT: oops, had two articles from the guardian on FB up and referenced the
wrong one.

~~~
nickpsecurity
"Maybe Facebook should just hire more moderators? I know they'd love to
totally relegate this to some awesome NLP algorithm but we're not there yet.
Facebook makes more than enough money to bring on some more employees (and
clean up their guidelines)."

There are systems that can detect porn pretty reliably. Helping moderators
spot any porn more quickly will also let them spot revenge porn more quickly.
Any correct or false positives can be fed back into detection systems. It
might still take more moderators, though. Facebook needs more anyway given the
size of user base and money available for moderation.

------
brighteyes
Facebook disabling 14,000 accounts in a single month because of that kind of
terrible behavior does show this is a serious problem. But it's still a very
rare problem. Given Facebook has 1.19 billion monthly users, that's on the
order of 1 in 100,000 accounts.

~~~
deegles
That seems high to me. We should strive for this to be so rare that it's news-
worthy when it happens at all.

~~~
dec0dedab0de
Well, it's really just an extension of gossip, blame, scandal and shaming that
has been around forever. There would need to be a major social change first.
Otherwise, even the perfect tech solution would just force this bullshit to
move somewhere else.

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kyledrake
Somebody check my math:

Facebook has 1.13 billion dailies, and 1,800 potential daily revenge porn
incidents: 1 in 627,777. Involving children, about 1 per day.. 1 in 1.13
billion?

Is flooded the right word to describe that? It actually seems pretty low to
me.

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gozur88
So _The Guardian_ puts this article up just as May's government is promising
to tighten government restrictions on social media. That was convenient.

~~~
objclxt
The Guardian isn't a right-wing paper, it's left of center, and I can't
remember when it last endorsed the tories. You'd be far more likely to see
that kind of thing from The Telegraph or The Daily Mail.

There's another explanation much closer to home which doesn't involve Theresa
May: The Guardian, like many other newspapers, is under intense pressure from
Facebook which is eroding their direct traffic in favor of traffic coming from
FB. They literally compete against each other for clicks and ad traffic.

~~~
gozur88
Sure, but the timing is suspicious. The editors at _The Guardian_ aren't above
giving a Tory proposal a little push if it's in their interest. Besides,
Labour is proposing essentially the same thing.

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bossx
They should have a verification process for accounts beyond verifying an email
address. Verify identity, it's way too easy for people to be impersonated,
there's a whole TV show dedicated to this...

~~~
planteen
You need a phone number to register a new Facebook account...

~~~
balls187
They're free with Google Voice

~~~
planteen
I don't think Google Voice will work for that nor will a Trello number. I saw
someone complaining on HN that their landline didn't even work.

~~~
cr0sh
Burner phone?

------
lightedman
Yea, someone tried doing this whole 'sextortion' thing to me on FB.

I laughed at them. I used to work in porn, you think you're showing people
something they haven't seen (let alone probably want to see again since I
'retired' [AKA got married?])

Sad that shameless people such as myself seem to be immune to this kind of
thing. Perhaps everyone should have a career in porn just to eliminate this
issue.

Give me a break.

