Bottom line: Facebook is far from the only place that people can share non-consensual images online but it is among the most consequential for the simple fact that, by nature, people you actually know are going to see them. With general porn sites or even dedicated revenge porn outlets, people have to be actively searching for such content to find it.
Facebook is publicly speaking out for the first time about the steps it is taking to mitigate revenge porn on its platform.
Radha Plumb, head of product policy research at Facebook, said that after hearing about how horrible the experience of having intimate images shared online is, the team was really motivated to try and figure out a better solution than simply responding to reports.
It’s a real issue, too. According to one source familiar with the matter, Facebook has to assess around 500,000 reports of revenge porn each month. And that’s in addition to the ones that get by Facebook’s first line of defense – artificial intelligence designed to detect such material at the moment it is uploaded.
Of course, not every step that Facebook has taken to combat the issue has been a success. In late 2017, Facebook promoted a limited pilot in which people could voluntarily subject their nudes to a photo-matching technique meant to prevent the same image from being uploaded by someone else at a later date.
According to NBC News, Facebook now has a team of around 25 people – excluding content moderators – that work full-time on fighting revenge porn. That number feels low considering Facebook now has 2.45 billion monthly active users.
