About a year ago Facebook implemented a set of tools to flag content, mostly photographic, so that the platform through photo-matching would prevent further uploads of it within its services, including Messenger and Instagram in the fray. This is where the project to combat revenge porn started, initiated and tested, at the moment, only in a few countries: Australia, the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. The process is really very simple: potential victims can provide the social network with images deemed risky so that they can be removed if they are uploaded. This is how Facebook tries to get ahead of cyberbullying by trying to intervene before the photos are even posted.
Revenge Porn what it means
The first steps of this project were taken in Australia, and the choice of the country was certainly not accidental. Indeed, it seems that in the kangaroo state revenge porn is almost an epidemic, and a study confirms this. As many as one in five Australians between the ages of 16 and 49 has been affected at least once by this sad shade of cyberbullying. But what exactly does revenge porn mean? Literally revenge porn stands for the public sharing through the Internet of images or videos withexplicitly sexual content without the consent of the subject involved. As the definition makes us understand the publication takes place mainly for the purpose of humiliating the person involved in retaliation (in this case we are talking about sextortion) or revenge. This is certainly not breaking news, nor should one think that given the Australian numbers it is a reality far removed from our country. Sadly well-known is the case of the young Tiziana Cantone , who died by suicide at the age of 31 because she could no longer bear the weight of shame, after fighting for a year and a half desperately demanding the removal of hot pictures and videos. Neither the first nor the last case in Italy where unfortunately the situation is truly worrying.
But is it right to fight revenge porn by asking the very victims, or potential victims, to upload their intimate photos to Facebook? Indeed it sounds absurd, plus scandals like Cambrige Analityca certainly do not entice users to trust and provide private and sexually explicit content in "defensive" terms to the ultimamento much-discussed social network. Is there really certainty and assurance that such shots will then be totally removed from the company's servers? In the meantime, there is one thing to be clear about one thing, the Facebook team is constantly aided and supported in its work by local institutions and the centers of Information Security (eSecurity Office) of individual countries. In Australia, there is a special national Esafety portal where citizens will be able to point out photos that they believe may be unfairly spread. From there, the photos will be reported to the eSafety office, which will then notify Facebook to prevent them from being uploaded.
Some time ago, Antigone Davis, who heads the global security division, explained how Facebook is making arrangements with organizations dealing with the issue to work together as best they can. For now, images can be uploaded securely, with a throwaway link, by making a request to one of the associations involved. The system the social network uses is very simple. Photos will be turned into a kind of digital footprint that the platform will compare with the shots uploaded by users. The fingerprint will, therefore, be used to block all photos with matches. A human team will manually verify the photos to certify that their content does indeed violate the platform's terms of service and that they are indeed non-consensual intimate images. Once these unique strings associated with the photos are created Facebook notifies the victim by email of any uploads and removes the images from the servers in no more than seven days. And the process repeats itself whenever that photo, no matter if renamed or edited, is relaunched in Facebook and the other owned apps.
We don't know if this is really the solution to the problem of porn revenge; what is certain is that it is an important first step forward. One in eight American social media users has been a target of unconventional pornography, according to a 2017 study. Unfortunately, this is a supranational phenomenon, and both men and women are victims of online harassment, but women are much more likely to receive sexual forms of abuse online. According to another survey it appears that there are as many as 54 thousand cases of revenge porn every month. So it makes us wonder if there is a volume problem first. Inappropriate content can be reported all the time on social networks but there are millions of requests for review every week, so we end up passing on inappropriate content as well to speed up the work. By involving institutions in the process Facebook wants to prevent instead of cure: to make it possible to report potentially dangerous images even before they are posted.