Facebook has kissed and made up with a ragtag group of child porn hunters scattered around the world.
As a result, Facebook now seems to be pulling pedophile pages off its site as quickly as they are being reported. It is turning the information over to the FBI and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children with more speed.
And — I’m proud to say — I’m in the middle of this detente.
But first things first.
Facebook, as I’ve been saying for a while, has a problem with pedophiles using its site to disseminate deviant photos of kids. The social network seemed to be trying its best to rid itself of child porn, but the task is immense and it has had setbacks.
These pornographic images often stay online for only minutes — just enough time for perverts around the world to copy them.
Making Facebook’s job harder is the fact that the company gets inundated with complaints from people with very different ideas of what is pornographic.
One of the biggest groups complaining about child porn goes by the names #OpScarecrow, #OpInnocence and #OpPedochat.
The leaders had been in touch with me because of a series of columns I did over the past year about Facebook’s pedophile problem. I eventually got Facebook to take down a page entitled “Pedophiles are people too,” which the company argued was an exercise in controversial humor.
As I was making it into my personal crusade, someone who appeared to be a leader of #OpScarecrow, #OpInnocence and #OpPedochat contacted me by e-mail to both thank me for the effort and chastise me for being naive.
There were, he said, thousands of worse pages on Facebook.
I still don’t know this guy’s real name, but he appears to live in Australia.
He complained that his group was being harassed by Facebook when it reported pedophilic content and — worse — that the social media company was lax in responding to complaints about child porn material.
I don’t remember if this guy asked me to reach out to Facebook on his group’s behalf or whether I did it on my own. But when I did, I got the other side of the story.
One Facebook official told me that the Australian’s group had made threats against people in the company. And Facebook’s security detail had ordered employees not to have any contact with the group.
So I did what any good negotiator would: I told the Australian and Facebook to work it out.
And I told the Australian that he needed to be a nicer person and to stop making threats or even I wouldn’t communicate with him. Apparently he didn’t know how to be any nicer, so I was soon contacted by a more civil person who said he was also a leader of the group.
This time it was a Brit who said he was working in Asia as a schoolteacher. His first message to me was, in part, “I am going to do my best to explain and try [to] convey our utter and total disappointment, and may I say disgust, in the way Facebook is facing the flood of such [child porn] content and lack of a determined and pro-active approach with dealing with it.”
He explained that hundreds of people were spending time tracking down child porn and “only a very small fraction gets removed and at such a slow pace that everyone is utterly frustrated often to the point of giving up.”
The teacher and I talked on the phone. Once I believed he had given me his real name, I convinced Facebook to communicate with him through me. Within a week or so, I wasn’t needed any more as a middleman.
The breakthrough seemed to be when the teacher assured Facebook that anyone in his group who made threats would be dealt with.
But Facebook’s pedophile problem also escalated at around the same time.
About two weeks ago, a video showing child sexual abuse was shared by 80,000 Facebook users. Some of the viewers may have gone to the page by accident; others may have only viewed the page so they could report it.
It was around this time that Facebook and the teacher got to know each other better.
Typically, the teacher would contact Facebook with “urgent” on the subject line and the message “this one needs quick attention.” After investigating — rapidly — the Facebook contact would reply with the rather odd code “escalating accordingly” before the offending page was taken down.
“I am grateful and re-motivated by your response,” is one recent comment by the teacher to the guy at Facebook.
The teacher also wrote to me yesterday about his group’s new relationship with Facebook: “What has happened during the past ten days is a huge breakthrough. It will not be forgotten.”
I need to mention a few other things to you. Sharing pornographic children’s images is illegal even if your motives are pure. The teacher never sends dirty links. He communicates the pages to Facebook as best he can without breaking the law.
I recently told the teacher that he now gets along with Facebook so well that I’m no longer needed. But he has insisted on sending me a copy of all his correspondences with the company.
Let’s see how long this goodwill lasts. But for now it feels good to have had a small part in this worthy crusade.