My reports are being actively ignored…
Lots of people use Facebook, from all demographics and age ranges. The platform publishes community standards which it claims it expects all users to uphold. My recent experiences suggest that not only do Facebook not care whether their standards are being upheld, but that they actively reject reports of breaches. Whether it’s because I’m not a media outlet and therefore they don’t need to pay lip service to me or not, I don’t know, but I think it’s worrying, and if my experiences can be reflected more widely across other social media platforms, it suggests there’s a major problem, affecting more than the occasional reports we hear about on the news, where posts are “actively removed as soon as [we] are made aware of them”.
Three types of standards breaches that I’ve experienced recently are related to pornography, identity fraud and general scams.
Pornography
I’m leading with this because my most recent experience with it is the one that’s prompted me to write this blog. My personal views on pornography here are irrelevant – it’s something that clearly is in high demand and therefore makes the industry a lot of money. The most recent figures I’ve seen suggest over £1 billion per annum in the UK alone. In the days of the internet with free content available pretty much everywhere, I’m not sure where that money comes from (maybe advertising?), but it’s not small change and I guess the providers want to increase their own market share. On the point of availability, if I wanted to view this stuff, I’d just head over to one of those very well known free sites and consume it there. What I don’t want to see is it sat in my Facebook feed, however well disguised. Remember the all demographics and ages thing? What if I were browsing the app on one of my mobile devices in a public place?
Anyway… I’ve had the usual scam friend requests featuring naked or semi-naked ladies (more on that later), but the most recent example was, well, different. As a 52 year old man, I’m at least as mature as your average 14 year old boy, and I like watching big dumper trucks and diggers in action – this is the sort of thing you’ll see in my normal feed. The other day I saw a post which was a picture of one that looked like it would be a video. The caption was something along the lines of “Great machine!” so I thought I’d take a look. It took me into the post itself, but the video wasn’t playing, so I clicked on it. The video that then played was of a wholly different subject. There was a young (20s ish?) naked girl walking around a room with a pink “device” inserted in a lower orifice, hanging out of the back. “Comments” were flowing up the screen under the video, attempting to represent a “live” interaction of some sort I guess. Well, like I said, Facebook isn’t the place I’d look if I wanted that sort of entertainment so I closed it down and submitted a report, blocking the user’s account.
A couple of days later, I had an update notification from Facebook, so interested in the action they’d taken I had a look:
We didn’t remove the video
[the zoo keeper], thanks again for your report. This information helps us reduce unwanted content for you and others.
We use a combination of technology and human reviewers to process reports and identify content that goes against our Community Standards. In this case, we did not remove the content that you reported.
If you think that we’ve made a mistake, you can request a review of this decision within 180 days.”
Erm… OK, you’ve used AI, it didn’t recognise the clicks needed to actually view the hidden video. Fair enough, so I asked for a review…
We didn’t remove the video
[the zoo keeper], thanks again for your report. This information helps us reduce unwanted content for you and others.
We use a combination of technology and human reviewers to process reports and identify content that goes against our Community Standards. In this case, we did not remove the content that you reported.”
Wow. So somebody reports this stuff, you’ve looked at it *twice*, and decided it doesn’t breach your policies. Maybe you’re getting a share of the revenue? Maybe it’s popular so you’re serving more ads in there? I don’t know, but it’s not right. Profit should not come before the safety of the users, or the potential safety of the girl in the video. Is she being pressured into her actions? Is there some sort of exploitation going on here?
Update
Interestingly, while typing this post, before publishing it, I’ve seen another notification from Facebook telling me that I can appeal this decision to their oversight board. This is good, and takes away some of the frustration I’ve been feeling. I had nowhere to actually type in what the problem was, so now we’re at this level, I did have that facility, so perhaps something will actually be done. I will update this post again if I hear back.
Identity Fraud
I think this heading covers a multitude of scams that appear on Facebook, but I want to highlight a couple that I’ve come across. First of all the most common – friend requests from complete strangers, normally in completely different countries, often with suggestive photographs, mostly empty profiles, you know the sort of thing. No, you’re not the person you’re pretending to be, no, I can’t even be bothered with a reverse image search. If I don’t know you, I’m not adding you. Facebook’s term for this is “authentic identity representation”. I’ve had so many of these, and I’m fed up with reporting them – the reports always come back with something along the lines of “we’re not doing anything, there’s nothing wrong with that request, they’re not a scammer” (obviously I’m paraphrasing here). I’m not sure what the benefit to Facebook is here – perhaps the ability to say they’ve got more active users and boost the share price a little?
The second type is one that actually had me on the hook, until they asked for money. They imitated a person / business that I follow and watch on other platforms. They added me as a friend in that other business’s persona, and initiated a convincing conversation. I want you to read this in the context of me being a Microsoft Azure platform architect, with 30+ years of IT experience behind me and a great deal of security awareness and regular training on the subject. When I say it was convincing, it had me believing I was speaking to the person they were claiming to be. I mentioned it to my partner and she said “Scam!”. As usual, she was right. All the signs were there that this was legit, the information in the account that had connected me was all legitimate, detailed and correct. I believed that if it was a scam, they not only knew the business / person well, but also must have hacked their account, so I carried on believing they were who they purported to be. Until like I said, they asked for money. I won’t go into the details here, but it was effectively to pay for the shipping of an item that their workshop produced. As soon as they asked I knew, so I thought I’d play them back a little bit, just to confirm. I slipped in some specific personal questions about the individual and their work that I knew the answer to, and sure enough, those questions were ignored. There was some attempts at bargaining, then I just got bored, shut the conversation down and removed the friend request.
To be fair to Facebook here, I didn’t report this one, and perhaps I should have, if only to try and protect other users. My previous experience with reporting scammers though just made me think there was no point. And this is one of the results of ignoring or rejecting genuine reports.
General Scams
Lastly I just want to finish of with this one. I’ll be brief because I’ve probably covered most of them above. I think they’re ones like the romance scams, or the friend requests with nude or suggestive pictures on the profiles. They’re pretending to be somebody else, the content of the profiles pretty much always breaches some other community standard like the “Adult nudity and sexual activity” one, yet report and block, and the notification comes back saying Facebook have done nothing. Why?? It’s patently clear that these aren’t real profiles. It’s clear that somebody is going to get scammed if they manage to hook them.
There’s also those ones where somebody adds the same comment to a post or as a reply to lots of other comments with something along the lines of “I like you, please add me as a friend”. Come on – if an automated system is not picking this up as a bot and/or a scam, it needs reprogramming.
Please, Facebook, tell us why you’re allowing this stuff, if not actively encouraging it by not dealing with the reports appropriately.
Summary
OK, I’ve whined for long enough. Scammers and pornography are on Facebook, just as they are on pretty much any other platform. I’m singling out Facebook because I don’t really use anything else – I shut down most of my social media accounts after Google Plus went down. I just think that an organisation the size of Facebook, with their power and reach, can actually do something about it. Please Facebook, start taking these things seriously and consider things like:
- When reporting, give us a free text field to tell you exactly what’s going on – even if that’s on the second round
- Stop this reliance on automated systems. Yes, use them for your own initial scans, but when somebody reports something, have that properly investigated by a real human. Have them interact with the post or profile just as the user did – you have the logs of what happened, surely?
- If an account with just pictures is making friend requests of people who live in other countries, assume that’s suspicious
- If somebody tries typing “Your content looks amazing, will you please add me as a friend” (or the similar texts that we all know and love) in a comments field, assume they’re a bot and/or a scammer and block them immediately
Until next time…
– The Zoo Keeper
