META Meta Platforms Inc

By Deepa Seetharaman and Stu Woo 

Facebook Inc. is once again on the defensive about how it reviews content on its site after a British Broadcasting Corp. investigation showed it failed to remove 82 of the 100 child exploitation images flagged by the news service.

In its report Tuesday, the BBC said it flagged 100 posts of child exploitation to Facebook by clicking a drop-down menu and hitting "report this post." These reports trigger a review that can result in Facebook removing posts for breaking their decency standards.

The posts included images of children in "highly sexualized" poses and a still from a child-abuse video, the BBC said. Just 18 of the 100 flagged posts were taken down, the BBC said, adding that Facebook sent automated messages saying the remaining 82 didn't break its community standards.

"We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards," Facebook said Tuesday. "This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and takedown measures."

The BBC said it wanted to see if Facebook followed its guidelines, so it flagged content that included pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children; images of minors in highly sexualized poses, with obscene comments posted beside them; groups with names such as "hot xxxx schoolgirls" containing stolen images of children; and an image that appeared to be a still from a video of child abuse, with a request below it to share "child pornography."

In an odd twist, Facebook also reported the BBC to law-enforcement officials focused on organized crime, child exploitation and other serious offenses after the news service provided Facebook with screenshots of the images.

On Tuesday, the BBC said it had sent the images to Facebook's communications team in London at its request. Facebook replied that it needed to see examples of the content before conducting an interview, the BBC said.

"It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation," said Simon Milner, Facebook's U.K. policy director. "When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry's standard practice and reported them to CEOP," the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, a division of the National Crime Agency.

The BBC said Facebook also canceled its interview with the news organization.

Over the past year, Facebook has faced criticism for allowing violent or sensitive live videos to remain on its site, including a violent attack on a Chicago teenager. These troubles were detailed in a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

But Facebook has also been overzealous in censoring images at time. Last fall, Facebook sparked an uproar when it deleted posts containing a famous Vietnam War photo of a girl fleeing napalm bombs. Facebook later reversed the decision.

The incident with the BBC is unlikely to repair the relationship between Facebook and media companies. Facebook has been meeting news organizations in recent weeks in an effort to smooth things over after a rocky year that included accusations of allowing fake news to proliferate on its site.

Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and Stu Woo at Stu.Woo@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 07, 2017 18:28 ET (23:28 GMT)

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