BBC Tells Facebook Child Porn Is On Its Platform, Social Network Reports Media Out To UK Police

Last week the BBC reported to Facebook sexualized images of children, but in a surprising twist, the social media company reported the BBC to the U.K. police, the media outlet said Tuesday.

The BBC, which had been investigating child porn on the social media platform, reported 100 images that were against Facebook’s guidelines barring "Nudity or other sexually suggestive content." The images included pages explicitly for men with a sexual interest in children and sexualized images of minors under 16, along with other material. Out of the 100 images the BBC reported only 18 were taken down. The automated message for the other dozens of photos said the images were not deleted because they did not breach "community standards."

To talk about the matter, Facebook’s director of policy Simon Milner agreed to be interviewed last week by the BBC, under one condition, that the media outlet provide examples of the material that it had reported that had not been removed by moderators.

The BBC did what Milner asked, but instead Facebook canceled the interview and reported the media outlet to the UK's National Crime Agency.

Facebook then said in a statement to the BBC:

"We have carefully reviewed the content referred to us and have now removed all items that were illegal or against our standards."

"This content is no longer on our platform. We take this matter extremely seriously and we continue to improve our reporting and take-down measures.”

"It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation.”

"When the BBC sent us such images we followed our industry's standard practice and reported them to Ceop [Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre]. We also reported the child exploitation images that had been shared on our own platform. This matter is now in the hands of the authorities."

The BBC’s director of editorial policy, David Jordan, said the move was “surprising.”

"The fact that Facebook sent images that had been sent to them, that appear on their site, for their response about how Facebook deals with inappropriate images…the fact that they sent those on to the police seemed to me to be extraordinary," said Jordan. "One can only assume that the Facebook executives were unwilling or certainly reluctant to engage in an interview or a debate about why these images are available on the Facebook site."

Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the U.K.’s National Crime Agency said he could not confirm or deny that BBC journalists were being investigated.