Tech

Facebook shrugs at cruel pictures of sex with overweight woman

A man posts pictures of himself having sex with an overweight woman along with cruel, degrading comments. Facebook sees nothing wrong with it.

The world’s biggest social media network threw up its hands after a Facebook user in Australia recently posted the despicable images and captioned them, “What’s the biggest whale you have harpooned? I went through a tubby phase and landed this 130kg (286-pound) beast.”

The images were shared in a closed men’s group of nearly 15,000 members where it received hundreds of likes and comments including, “That is bordering on bestiality!!!” and “This man has been to war and earned his stripes.”

The incident came to light after Hayden Brien, a member of the group, reported the images to Facebook. The site’s response: It “doesn’t go against any of our specific Community Standards.”





Brien took a screenshot of the post along with one of the images and shared it on his page, calling out Facebook for not removing it. (His screenshot censored the woman, but still showed the naked man on top of her.) The post has since gone viral.

“Men’s groups can be a great help to plenty of people going through tough times,” Brien wrote, “but ‘banter’ is no excuse for this sort of behavior.” He added that Facebook’s response was “beyond a joke” and the images remain in the group.

Facebook’s current Community Standards page on sexual violence and exploitation states that it will remove images “shared in revenge or without permissions from the people in the images.”

“We are investigating what happened here to ensure that our policies are applied consistently with respect to this type of content,” a Facebook spokeswoman said in an emailed statement.





“The safety and well-being of the Facebook community is our top priority, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images is a violation of our policies. We remove all instances of intimate content when we become aware of it, and use image-matching technology to prevent resharing of the image on our platforms.”

One woman commented on Brien’s post along with a screenshot of an apology from someone she claims is the person who shared the disgusting post. She said the purported perpetrator has changed his name and profile images.

“There is no excuse for what I have done and I am extremely and deeply sorry,” the post said, adding that the pictures were taken 10 years ago, with the woman’s consent, and wasn’t a recent livestream.

“I can assure you that I have taken myself to the police to allow them to deal with this issue further,” according to the posting.





The woman later posted a comment saying the user deleted the apology and seemingly changed his name and profile again.

Facebook has come under fire for its lackluster response to violent, hateful or abusive content, including so-called “revenge porn” posts. The company faced nearly 54,000 potential cases of revenge porn in January alone, according to a recent report in the Guardian.

Monika Bickert, the head of Facebook’s Global Policy Management, told the Guardian that Facebook’s sexual content policies are “complex areas” and the problem won’t be easily solved.

In May, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be hiring 3,000 moderators — on top of the 4,500 it already employs — to monitor videos and images reported as inappropriate content. This initiative was largely in response to outrage over people livestreaming suicides, rapes and killings.

In addition to more moderators, Facebook is planning “new tools” to better address and remove such images, including a “report” link and “photo-matching technologies” that are designed to stop the image from being re-shared after it’s already been removed.





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