Facebook will start to use photo matching technology in a beefed-up effort to stop the sharing of unauthorized nude photos — or “revenge porn” — the company announced in a Wednesday blog post.
The social network allows its billion-plus users to report intimate images that appear to have been shared without the subject’s permission by clicking a button, which flags it for its community operations team to remove if they deem that it violates Facebook’s standards. Facebook said it will also disable the account sharing those images “in most cases,” but there’s an appeals process.
Facebook will then go further and use photo-matching technology to “help thwart further attempts to share the image” on its Facebook, Messenger and Instagram platforms.
“If someone tries to share the image after it’s been reported and removed, we will alert them that it violates our policies and that we have stopped their attempt to share it,” Antigone Davis, Facebook’s head of global safety, wrote in the post.
Revenge porn has been a serious concern for Facebook, as incidents such as a private Facebook group involving Marines sharing nude photos of their colleagues have spurred calls for the company to do more to prevent those violations from happening. But it’s not just a Facebook problem — last summer, hackers posted nude photos of “SNL” actress Leslie Jones on her website, and earlier this month, Mischa Barton acknowledged that an ex-partner was shopping around sexually compromising images of the former “The OC” star.