Facebook to be sued over a nude teen photo
A 14 year old Northern Ireland girl is to go to trial with Facebook over the social media’s inability to prevent a nude photo of her from being repeatedly uploaded onto their website.
Despite attempts by Facebook to stop legal proceedings, a judge in Belfast has ruled that the case will go to trial, making it the first case of this kind in the world – one with potentially dramatic ramifications as to how Facebook can defend itself against similar kinds of legal cases in the future.
Between November 2014 and January 2016, lawyers for the girl claim that the girl’s nude photograph – which was extorted from her by a man who is also being sued – was uploaded several times onto Facebook on various “revenge porn” Facebook pages designed to shame women.
The case here is not that an indecent (and illegal) photo initially made its way onto Facebook. After all, Facebook cannot be held responsible for every single piece of content uploaded to its site from its billion + user base. Rather it’s that Facebook failed to prevent the photo from being uploaded several more times after they had already removed it, a functionality Facebook has the ability to perform.
Every image on the Internet has a signature. This is how reverse image searches work – by analysing the pixels within a photo to create a type of DNA-code that is unique to each photo. The case the lawyers are likely to make is why didn’t Facebook begin pre-emptively blocking anyone from uploading the nude photograph once they had initially removed it and thus were able to obtain that DNA-code for the image.
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The court heard it should have been a “red-line” issue for the company. Given that this photo was not only a nude photo from an unwilling participant, but an illegal one at that, this is something we’d imagine Facebook would be willing – nay, eager – to do.
In doing so, anyone who tried to upload the photo again onto the site would have been blocked from trying, and this case would not have ended up in the courts, and no doubt the 14 year old girl would have been saved from further humiliation.
Given that Facebook are currently working on auto-identifying specific people in images you upload using cutting-edge facial recognition technology, identifying and blocking a specific image from being uploaded to the site should be nothing but a walk in the park.
Facebook has been unwilling to block specific photos before. All the time we see the exact same photos of ill or disabled children from being uploaded to Facebook by like-farming spammers looking to lure Facebook users into sharing a post, even when the families of those children have implored Facebook to stop allowing people to upload these photos. Facebook may occasionally remove these photos, but they don’t stop people from just re-uploading them, which just leads to a case of whack-a-mole. You remove one offending image, and it just reappears straight after.
Will a successful trial against Facebook spur the social media giant to start improving their pre-emptive block list? We don’t know, but this is certainly an interesting case to be following, as it could set a legal precedent basically forcing Facebook to be more responsible in the future, something we can all get on board with.
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