By Radha Iyengar, PhD, Head of Product Policy Research and Karuna Nain, Global Safety Policy Programs Manager

The sharing of intimate images online can have serious emotional and physical consequences for the people whose photographs were posted. Sometimes called “revenge porn,” it’s really a form of sexual violence that can be motivated by an intent to control, shame, humiliate, extort and terrorize victims.

Discovering intimate images of yourself online when you didn’t consent to them being shared is devastating. That’s why we’ve taken a careful, research-based approach that concentrates on the victims — what they experience and how we can better protect them.

Over the last year, we’ve conducted our own research and partnered with many international safety organizations to review and improve our response to the sharing of what we call non-consensual intimate images (NCII) anywhere on Facebook, Messenger or Instagram. We tried to understand the experience of victims, how victims reported their experience, what barriers arose when they made a report and what support or tools they needed to feel safe on our platform. We interviewed victim support advocates and victims themselves from around the world, including Kenya, Denmark and the U.K. Last summer we brought together over 20 academics and non-profit leaders from 10 countries to improve our tools and understanding of how to support victims. This included educational information about NCII, information on where victims can go for help, and psychosocial support for those who had been victimized. For everyone, we instructed them on what precautions people can take on Facebook and other platforms to reduce their chances of being victimized.

Across the board it was clear that victims whose images were shared, or were threatened, feel violated, angry and embarrassed. They are scared and worried that their family, friends, and co-workers will see the images. In fact, harm for the victims continues long after the images are removed. The mental health consequences include anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, and sometimes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There can be economic and professional consequences for victims of NCII, including lost jobs, fewer professional connections, and colleagues who tease or avoid them. It can also be difficult finding new employment. Unquestionably, in many cases the costs to victims are serious and long-lasting.

Based on our discussions, the consequences that victims face vary depending on the cultural context. Victims in more traditional communities may be shunned and exiled from their communities. Organizations we’ve worked with reported cases in which victims were forced to run away from home to avoid persecution and even physical harm. And many countries lack established support organizations, or viable law enforcement solutions.

Moving forward, our overall approach will build on the work we’ve already done and focus on three key principles we heard repeatedly from victims and experts:

Build clear, accessible tools to support victims in reporting a violation. Develop prevention methods such as tools to report and proactively block someone from sharing non-consensual images. Give victims the power they need over their online space to feel safe.

Reporting

Our research indicates we can improve our reporting tools to ensure they are easier to use and don’t frustrate those who try. Victims we spoke with, for example, said they were put off by what they felt was Facebook’s robotic response to NCII — simply taking the images down but not finding a way to acknowledge the trauma that the victims endure. Other victims weren’t familiar with online reporting and weren’t sure how to navigate our processes in the first place. We also heard loud and clear that the time between when a victim reports to Facebook and when they hear a response from us is filled with anxiety and helplessness. Victims want fast but personalized responses because the damage they experience increases the longer the images remains online.

Based on this research, we are re-evaluating our reporting tools and processes to ensure they are straightforward, clear and empathetic. Anyone, not just the victim, can report NCII and we are working to better educate people who use Facebook on how to do that.

Prevention

Beyond reporting, we want to help potential victims who fear their intimate images may be posted and stop them before they spread. We built a proactive reporting tool in partnership with international safety organizations, survivors, and victim advocates to provide an emergency option for people to provide a photo proactively to Facebook, so it never gets shared on our platforms in the first place. You can learn more about this pilot here.

While this pilot has been subject to some criticism, our research with victims and feedback from organizations indicates this was an option victims generally wanted, and they wanted it built into the reporting process more specifically. To date, use of the program has been relatively low in part because many victims don’t know the program exists. And understandably, many victims are concerned about sending images to people they don’t know, so we are also working to better explain and clarify the process and safeguards in place. We also will expand this pilot to additional countries in the coming months.

Information

Almost all victims we interviewed said they would have appreciated more information and resources. These findings led us to design “Not Without My Consent,” which we launched today as a victim-centered site in our Safety Center to help people respond to intimate images shared without permission.

The goal in everything we’re doing is to improve our support and our response so we meet the needs of victims as we learn of them.

Today Mark Zuckerberg shared the following post with employees.

Hey everyone — I want to share some important updates as we organize our company to build out the privacy-focused social platform I discussed in my note last week. Embarking on this new vision represents the start of a new chapter for us.

As part of this, I’m sad to share the news that Chris Cox has decided to leave the company. Chris and I have worked closely together to build our products for more than a decade and I will always appreciate his deep empathy for the people using our services and the uplifting spirit he brings to everything he does. He has played so many central roles at Facebook — starting as an engineer on our original News Feed, building our first HR teams and helping to define our mission and values, leading our product and design teams, running the Facebook app, and most recently overseeing the strategy for our family of apps. Along the way, Chris has helped train many great leaders who are now in important roles across the company — including some who will now take on bigger roles in our new product efforts.

For a few years, Chris has been discussing with me his desire to do something else. He is one of the most talented people I know and he has the potential to do anything he wants. But after 2016, we both realized we had too much important work to do to improve our products for society, and he stayed to help us work through these issues and help us chart a course for our family of apps going forward. At this point, we have made real progress on many issues and we have a clear plan for our apps, centered around making private messaging, stories and groups the foundation of the experience, including enabling encryption and interoperability across our services. As we embark on this next major chapter, Chris has decided now is the time to step back from leading these teams. I will really miss Chris, but mostly I am deeply grateful for everything he has done to build this place and serve our community.

At the same time, as we embark on this new chapter, Chris Daniels has also decided to leave the company. Chris has also done great work in many roles, including running our business development team, leading Internet.org, which has helped more than 100 million people get access to the internet, and most recently at WhatsApp, where he has helped define the business model for our messaging services going forward. Chris is one of the clearest and most principled business thinkers I’ve met and the diversity of challenges he has helped us navigate is impressive. I’ve really enjoyed working with Chris and I’m sure he will do great work at whatever he chooses to take on next.

While it is sad to lose such great people, this also creates opportunities for more great leaders who are energized about the path ahead to take on new and bigger roles.

I’m excited that Will Cathcart will be the new head of WhatsApp. Will is one of the most talented leaders at our company — always focused on solving the most important problems for people and clear-eyed about the challenges and tradeoffs we face. Most recently he has done a great job running the Facebook app, where he has led our shift to focusing on meaningful social interactions and has significantly improved the performance and reliability of the app. In his career here, Will has helped lead our teams focused on security and integrity, and he believes deeply in providing end-to-end encryption to everyone in the world across our services.

I’m also excited that Fidji Simo will be the new head of the Facebook app. She is one of our most talented product and organizational leaders — passionate about building community and supporting creativity, and focused on building strong teams and developing future leaders. She has played key roles in building many aspects of the Facebook app, including leading our work on video and advertising. She believes deeply in helping people get more value out of the networks they’ve built. She has already led this team for much of last year while Will was out on parental leave, and she is the clear person to lead these efforts going forward.

Our family of apps strategy has been led jointly by Chris Cox and Javier Olivan. Chris managed the leaders of the apps directly and Javi has been responsible for all of the central product services that work across our apps, including safety and integrity, analytics, growth, and ads. Javi will now lead identifying where our apps should be more integrated. Javi is an incredibly thoughtful, strategic and analytical leader, and I’m confident this work will continue to go well. Since we have now decided on the basic direction of our family of apps for the next few years, I do not plan on immediately appointing anyone to fill Chris’s role in the near term. Instead, the leaders of Facebook (Fidji Simo), Instagram (Adam Mosseri), Messenger (Stan Chudnovsky), and WhatsApp (Will Cathcart) will report directly to me, and our Chief Marketing Officer (Antonio Lucio) will report directly to Sheryl.

This is an important change as we begin the next chapter of our work building the privacy-focused social foundation for the future. I’m deeply grateful for everything Chris Cox and Chris Daniels have done here, and I’m looking forward to working with Will and Fidji in their new roles as well as everyone who will be critical to achieving this vision. We have so much important work ahead and I’m excited to continue working to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.

“If Facebook has created a parallel online society for a quarter of the world to live in, the question facing Monika Bickert and her team is: What kind of society is it going to be?”

Vanity Fair reporter Simon Van Zuylen-Wood spent months embedded with members of Facebook’s content policy team — led by former federal prosecutor Monika Bickert — who deliberate, debate and painstakingly write the company’s rules on prohibited speech on Facebook.

Read the full article: March 2018, “’Men Are Scum’: Inside Facebook’s War on Hate Speech”

See also:

Promoting Safety with Policy, Product and Operations (video): How three Facebook teams work in lockstep to moderate content and keep abuse off the platform. Community Standards: Facebook’s Community Standards outline what is and is not allowed on Facebook, and apply around the world to all types of content

By Antigone Davis, Global Head of Safety

When someone’s intimate images are shared without their permission it can be devastating. To protect victims, it’s long been our policy to remove non-consensual intimate images (sometimes referred to as revenge porn) when they’re reported to us — and in recent years we’ve used photo-matching technology to keep them from being re-shared. To find this content more quickly and better support victims, we’re announcing new detection technology and an online resource hub to help people respond when this abuse occurs.

Finding these images goes beyond detecting nudity on our platforms. By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can now proactively detect near nude images or videos that are shared without permission on Facebook and Instagram. This means we can find this content before anyone reports it, which is important for two reasons: often victims are afraid of retribution so they are reluctant to report the content themselves or are unaware the content has been shared. A specially-trained member of our Community Operations team will review the content found by our technology. If the image or video violates our Community Standards, we will remove it, and in most cases we will also disable an account for sharing intimate content without permission. We offer an appeals process if someone believes we’ve made a mistake.

This new detection technology is in addition to our pilot program jointly run with victim advocate organizations. This program gives people an emergency option to securely and proactively submit a photo to Facebook. We then create a digital fingerprint of that image and stop it from ever being shared on our platform in the first place. After receiving positive feedback from victims and support organizations, we will expand this pilot over the coming months so more people can benefit from this option in an emergency.

“We are thrilled to see the pilot expand to incorporate more women’s safety organizations around the world, as many of the requests that we receive are from victims who reside outside of the US.” – Holly Jacobs, Founder, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI)

We also want to do more to help people who have been the targets of this cruel and destructive exploitation. To do this, we’re launching “Not Without My Consent,” a victim-support hub in our Safety Center that we developed together with experts. Here victims can find organizations and resources to support them, including steps they can take to remove the content from our platform and prevent it from being shared further — and they can access our pilot program. We’re also going to make it easier and more intuitive for victims to report when their intimate images were shared on Facebook. And over the coming months, we’ll build a victim support toolkit to give people around the world more information with locally and culturally relevant support. We’ll create this in partnership with the Revenge Porn Helpline (UK), Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (US), Digital Rights Foundation (Pakistan), SaferNet (Brazil) and Professor Lee Ji-yeon (South Korea).

Our work fighting this abuse and supporting victims wouldn’t be possible without the help of international experts. Today, on the sidelines of the 63rd U.N. Commission on Status of Women, we’ll hold an event with Dubravka Šimonović — the U.N. Special Rapporteur on violence against women — that brings together some of these victim advocates, industry representatives and nonprofits. We’ll discuss how this abuse manifests around the world; its causes and consequences; the next frontier of challenges that need to be addressed; and strategies for deterrence. We’re looking forward to this event and we’re thankful for these partnerships as we continue to team up on this important issue.

You can read more about the research behind today’s announcement here.

By Paresh Rajwat, Head of Video Products & Tamara Hrivnak, Head of Music Business Development & Partnerships

Today at SXSW, we’re sharing updates on how we’re bringing people together around video and music on Facebook — from Original shows to new features for Watch Party, and more ways to share music.

Building Community Through Content: Red Table Talk & More

Facebook Watch is the place where community, conversation and content come together. We’re investing in content that sparks conversations and interactions, whether that’s with your friends, other fans or even the stars of the show. Today we’re excited to announce that we will be bringing more than 20 new episodes of Red Table Talk to fans, starting this May. As we shared in December, Original shows on Watch should strike a chord in the broader cultural zeitgeist or serve a group of people with something they can’t get elsewhere. The women of Red Table Talk — Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter Willow, and mother Adrienne — have done that through their candid conversations about things like addiction, loss, domestic violence, race relations and more, sharing their truths and involving their audience along the way. This culminated with the recent episode featuring Jordyn Woods, which broke records as the most-viewed Facebook Original episode in the first 24 hours — 7.5 million people watched for more than one minute on that first day, with more than 800,000 interactions (likes, comments, reactions, shares) in just the first 72 hours.

We’re also happy to welcome another member of the Smith family to Facebook Watch: last month, Will Smith’s Bucket List premiered as one of the biggest debuts for an Original series. Other recent updates to our slate of Originals include the upcoming SKAM Austin Season 2 and community voting elements for MTV’s The Real World, debuting on Facebook Watch this spring with simultaneous seasons from the US, Thailand and Mexico.

New Watch Party Test

Watch Party lets people watch videos on Facebook together in real time, and since launching globally last year, we’ve seen more than 12 million Watch Parties in Groups alone. And Watch Parties garner 8X more comments than regular videos in Groups. We know people love to start and join Watch Parties around videos on Facebook, but we think there’s an opportunity for Watch Parties to help people connect with each other around content that is not on Facebook, too.

We’re introducing a new Watch Party experience that will enable people to host Watch Parties around what’s happening on live TV. People already come to Facebook to talk about exciting events and TV moments — now they’ll have a better way to do this together in real time. To start, we’ll test this globally in Facebook Groups during live sports events like UEFA Champions League soccer matches, giving sports fans the chance to cheer, debate and commiserate on Facebook while watching their favorite match-ups.

Here’s how it works: When you start a Watch Party, you’ll see a new option called “on TV,” where you can select the live game. From there, the Watch Party will feature the live game score as you discuss and react in real time alongside other fans. We’ll also be testing interactive tools within these Watch Parties to make the experience even more dynamic — like the ability for hosts to add trivia questions about player stats, or fun facts, and live polls around which team will win. While we’re testing this initially with sports, we can’t wait to bring it to all kinds of live events and cultural moments, from awards shows to highly anticipated show premieres and more.

More Places and Ways to Share Music

When it comes to people sharing their own videos on Facebook, there are a different set of features we need to provide — and music is central to many personal moments. We’ve been partnering with the global music community to make it possible for people to include music in their videos on Facebook, and today people in more than 40 countries can share personal videos with music. This includes India and Thailand, the newest additions to this list that we’re announcing today.

Our aim is to connect people with the music and artists they love. We’ve started by helping people find new ways to express themselves and connect with artists and other fans through features like Lip Sync Live, music stickers in Stories on Facebook and Instagram and the ability for people to add songs to their Facebook Profile. And today, we’re introducing a new feature: from a song on your profile, we’re making it possible to tap through to Spotify — so people can listen to the full song and discover more from that artist. We’ll be adding other partners in the near future as well.

This is just the beginning — we can’t wait to build more ways for people to express themselves with music on Facebook.

By Monika Bickert, VP, Global Policy Management

We are working to tackle vaccine misinformation on Facebook by reducing its distribution and providing people with authoritative information on the topic. We are starting by taking a series of steps:

We will reduce the ranking of groups and Pages that spread misinformation about vaccinations in News Feed and Search. These groups and Pages will not be included in recommendations or in predictions when you type into Search. When we find ads that include misinformation about vaccinations, we will reject them. We also removed related targeting options, like “vaccine controversies.” For ad accounts that continue to violate our policies, we may take further action, such as disabling the ad account. We won’t show or recommend content that contains misinformation about vaccinations on Instagram Explore or hashtag pages. We are exploring ways to share educational information about vaccines when people come across misinformation on this topic.

How This Will Work

Leading global health organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have publicly identified verifiable vaccine hoaxes. If these vaccine hoaxes appear on Facebook, we will take action against them.

For example, if a group or Page admin posts this vaccine misinformation, we will exclude the entire group or Page from recommendations, reduce these groups and Pages’ distribution in News Feed and Search, and reject ads with this misinformation.

We also believe in providing people with additional context so they can decide whether to read, share, or engage in conversations about information they see on Facebook. We are exploring ways to give people more accurate information from expert organizations about vaccines at the top of results for related searches, on Pages discussing the topic, and on invitations to join groups about the topic. We will have an update on this soon.

We are fully committed to the safety of our community and will continue to expand on this work.