Reporting Defaults

Most of the Facebook users interested in child pornography take it somewhere else or use private groups.  However, one will occasionally post some horrendous stuff to an open wall where anyone can see it.  Recently, I came across this and reported it to Facebook.  Here's what the reporting interface looks like.    We select the "nudity or pornography" category.

Here's what's a little worrisome.  Bear in mind that we're trying to report child pornography.  So why is the default option set to just block the user and not report it to Facebook?

Examiner Article

We were recently mentioned in an Examiner article by Raymond Bechard, who has written extensively about human trafficking.

To be fair to Facebook, dealing with abusive accounts is a hard problem and they've been making some effort.  They've got a system in place that seems to be automatically nuking a number of profiles.  However, the bad guys just come right back with new accounts, and I'd doubt that there's any mechanism in the "auto-nuke" system to report predatory users to law enforcement.  If not, that could mean that the only consequences some of the people are experiencing for soliciting and posting child pornography are having a Facebook account shut down.

Here's an interesting article from last year about Facebook not notifying Australian LE about child pornography:
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/facebook-failed-to-tell-police-about-paedophile-porn-ring-20100826-13ual.html
It says that someone had sent Facebook 10 messages telling them about the CP rings and nothing had happened.  That was likely more about the inability to process user messages than deliberate refusal to do anything about child pornography.

Facebook's reporting mechanisms are limited.  For example, imagine you see a profile of of a man hinting at sexually abusing his daughter.  How do you go about reporting that to Facebook?  Note that there is no "child exploitation" option anywhere.  If the profile picture contains actual nudity or pornography, that's reportable, but if they're just using a photo of a child to signal their interests, no dice.  "Inappropriate profile information" is limited to hate or violence, and there's nothing for profiles that refer to pedophilia or child porn.  There's also no free text field that allows you to provide additional information.

Realistically, Facebook has millions of users.  If you assume that 1% of accounts are abusive in some way but there are 100 million accounts ... well, that's potentially 1 million abusive accounts.  That's why Facebook wants to automate as much as it can -- they have to.  However, I would like to see an improved reporting system that allowed users to specifically flag child exploitation and other things that are problems but don't fit neatly into their existing system.  For example, how would you go about reporting a profile or page that seemed to be advertising an escort service (human trafficking)?

Windows Live and Cybertipline

Although this blog was inspired by content on Facebook, child pornography is a problem on numerous social networks.  For example, there are some profiles on Microsoft Windows Live that are so foul that they can't even be screencapped, let alone displayed here.  An activist from Spain who has been fighting child pornography for years provided a sampling, though he pointed out that there are hundreds of such profiles.

There are still error messages related to invalid site certificates on the Cybertipline site, but if we ignore those, we come to a lengthy form.  Filling this out would be OK if you only had one or two sites to report, but it quickly gets infeasible if there are a lot of URLs.  So we contacted Cybertipline and asked if we could submit in an alternate format, e.g., XML or tab-delimited text.  They said no, and also asked that only one profile per form be reported.

This may sound petty, but an interface that is cumbersome or confusing discourages people from using it.  At the end of the day, that could make the difference between whether child pornography gets reported or not.

Iced

Some of the stuff we've seen is reportable, so let's try filing a report with law enforcement.

Here's the ICE Cyber Crimes Center, which seems like a good starting point.  Let's try emailing the address they list on the right, Operation.Predator.ice@dhs.gov .

We got an error message from their server saying that the user Operation.Predator@ice.dhs.gov was unknown.  Someone suggested that the address was really supposed to be Operation.Predator@ice.dhs.gov, so we'll try that.

That gives us a different error message.

OK, they mention Cybertipline.  Let's try that site.

We click on the "Cybertipline" link and get this.

Do we want to add the exception?