Facebook on Wednesday said that it had removed 8.7 million user images of child nudity over the last three months. This was done with the help of previously undisclosed software that automatically flags such photos.
The machine learning tool rolled out over the last year identifies images that contain both nudity and a child, allowing increased enforcement of Facebook’s ban on photos that show minors in a sexualised context, Reuters reported.
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A similar system also disclosed on Wednesday catches users engaged in ‘grooming,’ or befriending minors for sexual exploitation.
Facebook’s global head of safety Antigone Davis told Reuters in an interview that the ‘machine helps us prioritise’ and ‘more efficiently queue’ problematic content for the company’s trained team of reviewers.
The company is exploring applying the same technology to its Instagram app. Davis told Reuters that the child safety systems would make mistakes but users could appeal.
“We’d rather err on the side of caution with children,” she said.
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Till now Facebook bans family photos of lightly clothed children uploaded with ‘good intentions,’ concerned about how others might abuse such images. The adult nudity filters and users used to catch child images.
The child grooming system evaluates factors such as how many people have blocked a particular user and whether that user quickly attempts to contact many children, Davis told Reuters.
However, the encryption of messages on platforms like Facebook-owned WhatsApp, prevents machine learning from analysing them.
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