Facebook takes new steps to block ‘revenge porn’

While posting revenge porn was already against the social network’s community guidelines, the Menlo Park company said it will now identify and catalog specific images reported as revenge porn, according to a blog post by Facebook’s head of global safety, Antigone Davis. Policing such images has proven a difficult task for Facebook and other social networks that deal with a flood of posts each day and have not always consistently enforced their policies regarding graphic images. Approximately 4 percent of U.S. Internet users, about 10.4 million people, have been victims of revenge porn — or threatened with the posting of explicit images — according to a 2016 study by the Data and Society Research Institute. Facebook’s policies on revenge porn have recently come into sharp focus after members of the Marine Corps were found to be sharing nude pictures of female Marines, without permission, in a private Facebook group. The company said Wednesday that it worked with several groups to develop its new policies, including the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative — a group co-founded by Holly Jacobs, who had been a victim of revenge porn. Davis said in the post that Facebook has worked with the group to create a “one-stop shop” for reporting revenge porn images posted on more than one site. Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, who has sponsored legislation that would make revenge porn illegal, said in a statement that Facebook’s “new tools are a huge advancement in combatting nonconsensual pornography and I applaud Facebook for their dedication in addressing this insidious issue.”