It’s tough being the world’s largest, most influential disseminator of information. One minute you’re accused of gratuitous censorship and the next, you’re in trouble for not being nearly censorious enough. I’m talking about Facebook, of course, the social network that came under fire last year for temporarily removing a famous photograph from its site of then 9-year-old napalm victim Kim Phuc, running down a Vietnam street naked, a photo that arguably defined the horrors of the Vietnam War. Facebook reinstated the photo when users rightly demanded that the site not censor images of war.

But a lot has changed since Kim Phuc’s image was briefly scrubbed from the social network’s newsfeeds: After a series of brutal murders and attempted suicides appeared on the site via Facebook Live (a new function that allows users to upload videos in real time), critics stopped fretting so much about Facebook’s censoriousness and began demanding increased moderation on the social network instead. This explains why Facebook recently announced plans to hire thousands of new moderators to screen for violent, hateful, and sexually explicit content, a decision many politicians and rights advocates celebrated as a necessary step toward protecting FB’s billion-plus users, namely those who are minors.

But that celebration came to an abrupt halt this weekend, when the Guardian newspaper got its hands on several leaked documents that consist, in the words of Guardian reporter Nick Hopkins, of more than “100 internal training manuals, spreadsheets and flowcharts that give unprecedented insight into the blueprints Facebook has used to moderate issues such as violence, hate speech, terrorism, pornography, racism and self harm.”

Among the most controversial findings in the leaked documents is this one: “We allow ‘evidence’ of child abuse to be shared on the site to allow for the child to be identified and rescued, but we add protections to shield the audience.”

Facebook applies this same logic to footage of self-harm. According to another of the leaked documents: “Removing self-harm content from the site may hinder users’ ability to get real-world help from their real-life communities.” This is actually true; this month police were able to successfully prevent a teenage girl’s suicide, most likely because she expressed plans to take her own life on Facebook Live.

But the site’s guidelines around violent threats are perhaps not so logically sound. In a leaked document called “Credible Violence,” Facebook gives specific examples of violent statements that moderators should ignore versus statements they should immediately remove from the site. According to these guidelines, a threat that constitutes removal must be specific in nature.

A few of the site’s examples of statements worth removing: “Someone shoot Trump” and “We should put all foreigners into gas chambers.”

A few examples of statements Facebook has deemed acceptable? “Kick a person with red hair” and “Let’s beat up fat kids.”

Needless to say, anti-bullying advocates are not happy about this. Nor should they be. After all, why is it unacceptable to advocate violence against foreigners, but perfectly fine to advocate violence against redheads or fat kids? You could just as easily make the argument that a threat against redheads and fat kids — not to mention red-headed fat kids — is more specific and thus more imminently dangerous than a blanket threat against foreigners in general. (And God help those red-headed fat foreigners.)

But this is, at the end of the day, totally beside the point. The question we should be asking ourselves isn’t what Facebook can do to protect users, but what we can do to protect ourselves. Why anyone would expect that Facebook, a site that apologized only two months ago for allegedly allowing advertisers to target emotionally vulnerable teens as young as 14, should emerge as a leading champion of children’s safety is beyond me.

Rather than rail against Facebook and demand the social network operate in the same fashion as a traditional media company — which it is not and will never be — why not advocate for a massive push toward greater social media literacy in schools? Give kids the tools to protect themselves: to understand where their news and images originate and determine why they are seeing what they’re seeing.

The greatest threat facing kids today is not, in my mind, the possibility that they’ll be exposed to violent and sexually explicit content on social media, but that they don’t know where their information is coming from. Or why it’s chosen them.

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