Did Facebook finally figure out that consent is more important than nipples?

News blasts and platform alerts regarding Facebook’s fake news tool, released just one week later, far surpassed publicity around its new approach to protecting sexually explicit images. Women and others being affected still don’t know this new solution exists, and the Facebook community doesn’t know the platform has a clear position on more than women's nipples.

 

Warning messages about community standard violations are necessary, but Facebook could also take advantage of a thwarted upload to raise awareness regarding consent criteria. Could Facebook have a targeted public message campaign on sexual rights, expression and consent in partnership with civil society organisations? Or how about a simple ad announcing how to report a non-consensual intimate image?

 

In some countries, Facebook points people to organisations that can provide support when sexually explicit photos are leaked. Facebook should broaden its resource network to reflect the global geographic and multilingual diversity of its community. It should ensure that recommended organisations defend women’s rights from a human rights framework rather than a moralistic or protectionist point of view which further polices and shames sexuality. Facebook could deepen the collaborative process with the safety round tables initiated in 2016 to help rights organisations raise awareness on its platform about bodily autonomy and why non-consensual distribution of intimate images is a violation against people’s freedoms. 

Facebook has had an option to report non-consensual sharing of intimate images for a while – what changes with this innovation is what happens after a report. Unfortunately, it's still not as straightforward as it could be, something we’ve pointed out to Facebook consistently over the years. If you are naked in a photo, and those likes are climbing exponentially, you don’t have time to figure out which rabbit hole of drop-down options you should go down. Most women we accompany immediately choose the logical "I'm in this photo and I don't like it", which only takes you to seemingly petty (by comparison) options about the way your hair looks and letting your buddy know you want the pic taken down. There is no "It's a private sexual image of me being shared without my consent" option there. Why not? Why not include the option to report a non-consensual photo in any logical place a user might go?

So where do you have to go to report? Select "This should not be on Facebook" > “What's wrong with this photo?” > “This is nudity or pornography (for example, sexual acts, people soliciting sex, photos of me naked)". This option is more intuitively selected by a bystander – a Facebook citizen concerned about community standards – than by someone directly affected. You can also use this form to report, even if you are not a Facebook user: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact/567360146613371 

It's not clear how long Facebook plans to keep an account deactivated. Will people be banned for life if they have posted intimate content without consent? "Banned for life" may sound extreme, but users can usually create a new account easily. They won't be able to post the same photo, but they can get back on Facebook. The new measure does not address this problem. 

 

It's also not clear if every single account that shared the photo will also be deactivated. What will happen to those accounts that attempt to upload a previously flagged photo? Will Facebook examine other information such as IP or browser fingerprint to determine repeat offenders, similar to Twitter's attempts to curb abusive accounts by comparing phone numbers, or who is being targeted for attack by new accounts? Will repeat offenders face immediate deactivation of new accounts?

Leaving such nuanced decision making up to algorithms or artificial intelligence would guarantee disaster. Rather, Facebook cites a team of specially trained community operators will vet the images. Details of what this special training entails remain murky. Minimally, multilingual, multicultural staff trained in understanding gender, sexual rights and expression, victim-blaming and unintentional censorship are needed to properly understand the context in which such photos are being shared and the harm that can result if they are not taken down.

 

Even with special training, context is everything. What if the photo is non-consensual but not exactly in violation of Facebook’s nudity terms? Is the fact that it is non-consensual sufficient to tag it as a violation? What if it puts the subject at risk, because the image content goes against cultural or societal norms or reveals someone's identity?

 

Many people post photo teasers that don’t quite violate the Facebook nudity policy, linking off-site to other online spaces after hooking in their Facebook community. What if the user is located in a country where state and community policing of sexuality can put their bodily integrity at risk if such photos are viewed? How will Facebook’s community operators respond in these context-specific situations? Is their ultimate goal with this policy to “prevent harm”, ensure consent, or enforce nudity standards?

 

Community operators are under pressure to make decisions in the blink of an eye given the amount of reports they must address. With this widespread problem you need more specially trained support team members, not faster decision making. 

Any decision to take down content and close accounts in a service as broadly used as Facebook demands special considerations around accountability, transparency and appeal. We hope Facebook will share and continue to consult with rights-based organisations about how its criteria for take-down can evolve, the type of training for community operators, and how it will evaluate the effectiveness of this measure. Transparency regarding the number of take-downs, accounts affected, and analysis of the scope of the problem would be invaluable to develop better solutions on Facebook and beyond.

 

A lot of specific questions arise depending on one's advocacy work. For example, those supporting women facing non-consensual distribution of intimate images want to know more about cooperation with legal proceedings: will relevant information such as the extent of photo duplication and accounts responsible for or attempting distribution still be available if requested by a court order, especially if accounts are being closed and photos eliminated from the system? 

 

Freedom of expression advocates will have a lot of questions about proportional response and monitoring if Facebook has overstepped. For example, how to ensure that an account ban is proportional to the offence? Any woman who's been deluged with harassing comments or lost her job (to name just a few consequences) due to non-consensual sharing of an intimate photo will not question if banning is proportional to this violation of Facebook community standards, but such questions are important to ask from a rights-based point of view. As banning is Facebook's last and most extreme option, how does harm or intent play into account suspension? For example, what if you are a kid randomly sharing sexy photos, possibly without knowing the subjects, versus someone targeting a woman’s employer, colleagues, family, friends, or linking the photo to identifying and locational information? What if a user is tried under some sort of civil law or penal code, pays damages or even serves time – should they never be allowed to have a Facebook account again? 

We cannot dismiss that biased enforcement of community standards has translated into violating women's freedom of expression and rights to bodily autonomy in the past. Facebook considers women's bodies as inherently sexual. Although last year Facebook reiterated that breastfeeding or pictures of mastectomies do not fall under its nudity ban, it still regularly censors news in the public interest, pictures of protests, sex and health educational campaigns, and artistic expression. 

 

It is essential to ensure that women's consensual sexual expression is not being censored as a result of these new measures, especially when photos are reported by someone other than the subject (a positive feature but one that can be abused). 

The appeals process is crucial, because if there is one thing women’s rights defenders know, it is that policies made to defend people whose rights are marginalised are frequently taken advantage of by those with power to further marginalise those at risk. We must all be alert to how this system might get played to attack consensual sexual expression and any expression in favour of women’s and LGBTQI rights.

For years Take Back the Tech! and many other women's rights activists have been asking internet intermediaries to take some responsibility regarding the online gender-based violence that their platforms help facilitate, including the distribution of sexually explicit images without consent. We even had to do a campaign about in 2014 – What are you doing to end violence against women?. A key demand was consulting with women's rights activists and women Facebook users, especially those based in the "global South", to gain a deeper understanding of women's realities on Facebook and how the harm they experience has been magnified by the platform's personalised, networked nature and historical lack of privacy by default.

 

For this innovation, Facebook collaborated with the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, which has advised survivors and legislators in the US on this issue since 2013. It also finally held safety round table discussions with some participation from women’s rights organisations based in Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent Latin America in 2016. While collaboration does take time it clearly produces valuable, nuanced solutions. If this had been a true priority for Facebook, such a solution could have been viable sooner, especially within Facebook’s own platform.

 

Non-consensual distribution of intimate images is clearly a problem that is much larger than Facebook. If this measure stays limited to Facebook, people will simply increase this activity on other sites. An important next step will entail cross-platform collaboration throughout the tech industry. Collaboration with rights-based organisations to avoid unintentional censorship and the system being abused to limit LGBTQI and women’s rights, including their right to sexual expression, is also necessary. Non-consensual distribution of intimate images is not a legal violation in most countries and may be a civil rather than criminal offence. It is frequently poorly defined; some countries have even tried to outlaw sexting, the consensual sharing of intimate images. Experiences in assessing violent extremist images and establishing a shared database of hash values, although also controversial, can help inform how this initiative can grow. 

 

If Facebook is able to cultivate a gender-aware, rights-informed support staff who can vet questions of consent and context – not just nudity – when making calls on intimate images, the resulting database will provide extensive credible content of invaluable potential if later pooled in a shared, independent cross-sector database. Such an initiative has to be focused on addressing harm, not curbing sexual expression, education, or pleasure.