Fury as child abuse picture goes viral on Facebook with 16,000 'shares' and 4,000 'likes'

The clip was of a young girl apparently being abused by a grown man



Some users shared grabs of video on Twitter to alert others of the danger

Twitter hosted a torrent of furious tweets asking how clip got onto Facebook

Facebook removed clip 'swiftly', but already seen by thousands of users



Disgust: Hundreds of users logged onto Facebook yesterday to find the disturbing footage appear on their personal news feed

Facebook has sparked fury after a graphic child abuse video went viral on the social network, reportedly being 'shared' over 16,000 times.



Thousands of users logged onto their accounts last night to find the horrifying footage appear on their personal news feed and instantly took to Twitter to vent their disgust.

According to users who saw the clip, apparently of a young girl being abused by a grown man, it had already been shared over 16,000 times and received almost 4,000 'likes'.

Even more disturbingly, users then began uploading and sharing screen grabs of the video on Twitter in an apparent bid to alert fellow Twitterati of the horrifying content.

Many more voiced their outrage on rival website Twitter at how the video could be shared on Facebook despite the site’s extensive reporting tools .

User Harmony wrote: 'theres a legitimate child porn video circulating on Facebook!! nearly 4k likes and over 16k shares in under 7 hours... this world is sick.'

Maddison Twatter wrote: 'There is child porn on my Facebook timeline... I'm so f******* angry.'

Another user called Nicholas added: 'Someone posted child porn on Facebook and its spreading like wildfire. Why the **** would someone do that to a child.'

A Facebook spokesperson said: 'Nothing is more important to Facebook than the safety of the people that use our site, and this material has no place on Facebook.

'We have zero tolerance for child pornography being uploaded onto Facebook and are extremely aggressive in preventing and removing child exploitative content.



'We are pleased that this material was reported to us quickly enabling its swift removal.'



Disturbing: Thousands of users woke up yesterday to find the disturbing footage appear on their personal Facebook news feed and instantly took to Twitter to vent their disgust

Shock: Even more disturbingly, users then began uploading and sharing screen grabs of the video on Twitter in an apparent bid to alert fellow Twitterati of the horrifying content

Sick: The disturbing footage apparently showed a young girl being abused by a grown man

But this disturbing underbelly of the popular social networking website is not a new revelation to the company, which until 2011 relied heavily on reports from its users about illegal activity.

Last year an exposé published by WND.com revealed a disturbing amount of child pornography being shared by predators on the social network.

Graphic photos of children, including infants and toddlers, were uncovered by the site , some taken from entire albums of children forced into acts by paedophiles.

Firewall: Last May, Facebook, founded by Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) incorporated Microsoft's PhotoDNA program designed to cull through images and data quickly in a bid to police the website and rid it of abuse

Others too graphic to publish included photographs of children forced to have sex with each other, being raped by adults, and forced to expose their genitals to the camera.



Last May, the inclusion of Microsoft's PhotoDNA program helped to cull through images and data quickly in a bid to police the website and rid it of abuse.



Troubling: But this disturbing underbelly of the popular social networking website is not a new revelation to the company, which until 2011 relied heavily on reports from its users about illegal activity

Anger: The video had apparently been shared over 16,000 times by by 2am GMT today

Facebook said at the time the program was used to search for several thousand illegal images among the 200million uploaded each day, focusing on children under 12 as part of an initiative to battle 'the worst of the worst'.



The program is able to search for some of the thousands of photographs collected by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children ( NCMEC) , which helps to identify and help victims and cooperates with authorities on investigations into their origins.









