How many people are likely to use Facebook’s latest idea to tackle revenge porn?
Facebook has come up with an unusual idea to protect the victims of revenge porn using photo-recognition technology similar to that used for protecting copyright: people can upload images they fear that their former partners might post on Facebook, which would then be eliminated and converted into a hash, or digital fingerprint, the company would use to prevent them from being uploaded to Facebook, Instagram, or shared in Messenger. In April, Facebook launched an initiative that allows victims to report the publication of photos to prevent them from being republished on the company’s networks, so now this is just about changing the source of the image from the one that someone uploaded to Facebook, to the one uploaded by the potentially affected user.
Does it make sense to ask Facebook users, in this case, mostly women, to intimate and potentially painful photographs of themselves to avoid becoming victims of revenge porn? To do so, firstly, they would have to overcome the fear of doing something totally counterintuitive: uploading private material to a social network, a place specially designed for sharing. This would also require further leaps of faith: not only trusting the company to do what it said and remove the image once it had been converted into a hash, but also that material wouldn’t be stolen by Facebook employees or hacked. Similarly, angry ex-partners, seeing that their revenge bid was blocked by Facebook, Instagram or Messenger, could simply post the material somewhere else. And all this assuming that the victim either had access to any images or even knew about them.
None of the women I talked to about Facebook’s idea said they would give it a go: one can only wonder how much research the company put into this before launching it. In short, the technology is interesting, but from a psychological perspective it’s a non-starter. A far more sensible approach to dealing with the problem of revenge porn would be to impose tougher sanctions on wrongdoers, something that would not be difficult to do, given how easy it is to trace people.
This is certainly a serious matter, and one that affects 4% of Facebook users, a figure that rise to 10% among women under 30, and that in no way is the fault of the victim. There’s no question that Facebook is capable of coming up with more technically brilliant solutions; its problem seems to be a general lack of awareness and sensitivity about how the real world operates.
Facebook is undoubtedly a very interesting company for developers: one with a huge amount of talent, led from the front by its founder, who still regularly writes and reviews code. Maybe the time has come for the company and its management to apply their skills to better understanding the psychology of its users.
(En español, aquí)
