Vikki Campion: Twitter, Facebook must target child sex exploitation

Social media giants have to power to ban presidents but when it comes to child sex exploitation, survivors are still forced to report their own rape videos, Vikki Campion writes.

If we can de-platform a president, then why can’t we de-platform child sexual abuse? The global epidemic of child sex exploitation has exploded during COVID-19 — and you don’t need to dive into the dark web to find it — it’s proliferating on Twitter and Grandma’s favourite social media Facebook.

On Twitter, paedophiles can sexually abuse a child in the Philippines “live” and buy an entire library of child abuse for less than P100 (AU$2.69). For every reported and banned account, the abusers create another in minutes.

Child sex exploitation survivors, now in their adulthood, have to witness and report their own rape back to Twitter as it is shared online.

It is time Facebook and Twitter stop pretending to be unregulated, ungoverned and altogether not responsible for the use of their platforms with a game of “whack-a-mole” forcing other users to police their space.

The jig is up.

Following the horrific events in the US, announcing its permanent ban of @realDonaldTrump, Twitter cited its “public interest framework”.

Outgoing US President Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and Facebook. Picture: Twitter/@whitehouse

The Trump decision proves once and for all that these are moderated spaces, governed by an unseen board.

The 17th Twitter Transparency Report released on Monday celebrated a 68 per cent increase in enforcement under their Child Sexual Exploitation Policy.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says child exploitation is one of the most serious threats they focus on, and build “sophisticated systems” to find. But they often don’t. They choose the laziest option and leave it up to us.

Facebook relies on its own users to flag it for review by a User Support Team based in Menlo Park, California, Austin, Texas, Dublin, Ireland or Hyderabad, India.

Sure, algorithms are getting smarter and improving all the time however the only way to stop the upload is to have a human verification step and hire actual human beings to do it.

Do you know what platform does have a human check every video that goes on their website? Pornhub.

And if the one of the greatest pornography aggregators can do it — so can Facebook.

Pornhub banned all user generated content because of this exact problem, scrubbing millions of user-uploaded videos last month.

On Facebook, private breastfeeding mothers groups which help teach new mums how to feed babies, regularly find their breastfeeding images removed even though Facebook’s own policy says they are fine.

A machine has a great deal of trouble deciding between an unacceptable breast and an acceptable breast. Pixels are difficult to algorithm out.

If you try to post a video on a political page with a Taylor Swift song, the video will never upload — because Facebook knows it is a breach of copyright. A song has a signature that AI can quickly learn.

An algorithm will work perfectly for a song but won’t tell you if a child is being abused.

Twitter and Facebook wield total power over their domain. They hold their own digital government with CEO’s instead of PM’s.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Picture: Mandel Ngan/AFP

Twitter and Facebook determining what is real and right is the intellectual nutritive equivalent of handing over your food choices to McDonalds for Prime Minister Ronald McDonald to decide.

They own the software — the infrastructure that their platform is held on and makes billions from — yet where is their responsibility to stop this stuff going up?

If Facebook and Twitter were fined every time child sexual exploitation went on their website, as McDonalds is if it serves poison, they would do something about it.

Breakfast show presenters are constantly and falsely made the face of erectile dysfunction pills — a clear breach of Facebook’s own advertising policy but Facebook claims it can’t stop it unless it is reported.

That’s just crap. They absolutely can — hire a human to view the ad before it goes up.

These are companies making billions every year and profiting from ads scamming Australians to the tune of $15 million a year.

They use two of the three wise monkeys. They hear no evil, see no evil — but by God do their platforms speak for evil.

Pensioners get scammed. A kid in the Philippines gets sexually abused and live streamed after school.

The tech giants are beholden to one thing, and don’t fool yourself into believing it is a civic duty.

Simply, there is no money to be made in destroying access to child abuse material, just as there is money to be made in selling digital advertising space to scammers to falsely claim “Karl Stefanovic’s Erectile Dysfunction Fix Has Experts In Awe And An Industry Terrified”.

No algorithm made a decision on Trump. That was a person.

In 2021 tech giants play a major role in our civic discourse but now they have entered the field as referee, it’s time they up their game.