Facebook was forced to report the BBC to the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) after the broadcaster shared with the company screenshots of “sexualised images of children” that it had copied from the site, Ars understands.
On Tuesday, Facebook was bombarded with criticism after the BBC claimed that the free content ad network had failed to nix 82 images, even though they appeared to clearly break the firm’s own “community standards” rules.
Ars has learned that Facebook had requested links to the offending material from the BBC —which reportedly included “pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in 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”—but instead the broadcaster provided screenshots taken from the site.
In its story, the BBC said: “When provided with examples of the images, Facebook reported the BBC journalists involved to the police and cancelled plans for an interview.”
However, the BBC’s investigation may have been overshadowed because it appears to have fudged the procedure for handling such atrocious and illegal material.
Ars has asked the BBC if it followed the Crime Prosecution Service (CPS) and Association of Chief Police Officers’ (ACPO) guidelines on exemptions relating to individuals who “are acting to combat the creation and distribution of images of child abuse.”
It declined to respond directly to our questions, however. The BBC said:
In 2016 a BBC investigation found that paedophiles were using secret groups on Facebook to post and swap sexually suggestive images of children which led to one man receiving a four year prison sentence. One year later in this follow up investigation we found similar images still on the site, which we reported using Facebook’s own moderation procedures.
Some of the images were then removed, but the majority remained on the site. When the BBC approached Facebook with its findings, Facebook agreed to an interview on the condition the BBC provided examples of the remaining material which had been deemed acceptable by Facebook’s own moderation procedure. The BBC provided that evidence to Facebook.
According to the CPS, extreme care must be taken with illegal material that shows children being sexually abused. Its guidelines state: “Investigation should not involve making more images, or more copies of each image, than is needed in all the circumstances.”