Last week the Police arrested a 21-year-old man from Beliatta on suspicion of operating Facebook groups to share and sell non-consensual sexual images. The suspect, who Police say operated the groups over two years, has since been released on bail. The Police’s computer crimes and children and women’s divisions are continuing investigations.
Over the past fortnight, CERT, the government’s cybersecurity agency, detected “about four” such Facebook groups, after receiving 25 complaints from the public. These Facebook groups were used to find and engage potential new recruits and then move them to Whatsapp, a closed and encrypted platform. They advertised non-consensual sexual imagery and instructions on drugging victims to facilitate sexual abuse. Users were even attempting to sell photos and videos of female members of their own families, including children.
But at least one group with posts offering sexual content of their mothers still remains active.
In this case, Charuka Damunupola, lead information security engineer at CERT, thinks that the group’s three-year-long history means it's less likely to be flagged by automated moderation, which he says trusts older groups more. Meta “takes time to respond”, he said, and its automated moderation tools struggle to flag violations written in less populous languages like Sinhala.
“Sometimes when the content gets taken down, the damage is already done. But if it involves minors, the automated system detects it promptly.”
While CERT previously had a direct escalation channel with Meta, they handed that over to the Police’s Computer Crime Investigation Division, last year.
When they established this direct channel with Meta over a decade ago, CERT sent about a hundred cases monthly to the big tech company. Now the number of complaints they receive has risen to about 2,000 a month.
Damunupola says “was difficult to handle” for their 15 member team. The police’s computer crimes division, he claims, has a team of 190. “They still struggle with the channel.”
When a Meta user reports a content violation, if the regular process does not work, Meta has an escalation process. The form is filled by the Police, or the user. Meta’s human reviewers usually make their moderation decision on escalations within three days.
According to organisations like Delete Nothing and The Grassrooted Trust, who find and report online sexual abuse, these types of content farming groups have existed since as early as 2015.
Meta criticised
They say Meta’s been less responsive of late. When Delete Nothing reported 16 such groups last month, they say they got a boilerplate response, said Shelani Palihawadana, referring to Meta’s acknowledgement of their complaint. After the 2018 Digana riots and the social media ban imposed to contain the violence, Meta whitelisted “about 15” trusted partners, according to Darshatha Gamage, formerly of Hashtag Generation which used to be a trusted partner. The partners included government agencies, NGOs, and the Police. Their complaints would bypass standard content violation reporting queues.
