I've reported actual child pornography with hundreds of likes and comments and got that reply from Facebook.

On the other hand, a Facebook group I created for my CS course with a few hundred members and just a bunch of helpful course material and questions vanished for a few months without any sort of warning or notification, and showed up like it had never been gone in the first place. I tried to contact Facebook, even finding a form specifically for groups that vanish, and got no reply whatsoever. I still don't know what the hell happened there.

If they consider childporn "not against their community standards", isn't that enough reason to report them to the police and make a huge public stink about this?

In theory, yes. In practice I haven't found a way to do so, especially with Facebook being a big American company and me living on the other side of the ocean... The best case I can imagine would probably be an e-mail from the police department arriving at Facebook a few months after and the content being removed, there isn't any real way to damage them without the effort and luck of a targeted PR attack.

Aren't your national newspapers interested in this? It might not become an international scandal, but some newspaper attention will get noticed, and will likely get mentioned again and again in every political discussion about the impact Facebook has on our society.

Also, report it to the police with all the evidence and screenshots you've got and just let them handle it.

It might not bring down Facebook on its own, but it will add to all the other demands that Facebook needs to get a better handle on this sort of thing.

Depending on the jurisdiction taking screenshots might be a crime in itself. And I doubt that this would make a good news item, it's not like the newspapers can reprint the material in question or the url, so it's unlikely that anyone who likes Facebook would find the article convincing.

A criminal conviction of a Facebook employee would make a good story, but that is much harder.

A screenshot of Facebook's message that it's not against their standards, I mean. That should be easily reprintable, unless it contains the original image.

What would that screenshot prove, without the original image next to it? All it proves was that something was reported, but Facebook disagreed. Could be something horrific, or it could be a picture of a tree. There is no shocking news story here.

That line of argument leads to never being able to report anything. Just report it, and let the police and journalists figure out the details.

I guess heres my bigger question. If some individual where to have knowledge of a murder or rape and it came to light that they were intentionally with holding the evidence of the crime, would this individual be committing a crime themselves?

I just imagine if someone found a snuff video on my basement that I would be in violation of a law.

Consider who the person is reviewing these things. Imagine all the horrible fucked up shit they see on a daily basis.

I wouldn't be surprised if after seeing videos of babies being killed, people being beheaded and hung, that some sperm yelling at women might not even register to them as a bad thing.

And "horrible fucked up shit" amounts to clicks. People don't stream Lawrence Welk for their modern entertainment needs. I say the company knows damn well what content it leaves untouched. It caters to enablers.

Well, to play devil's advocate to your point, it's barely Facebook's fault that the public has an appetite for such heinous material. People want to watch these things, why do we blame Facebook for that and not ourselves?

People seem to have an appetite for all kinds of heinous acts, and if you don't actively maintain a social standard that condemns and punishes such behavior, you're left with the law of the jungle.

Social networks already make it harder to maintain these standards because they dissociate their subjects from one another. It's easier for me to send you a death threat if, to me, you're just a bunch of words I disagree with under a profile picture.

They also facilitate the mobilization of like-minded people at an awesome scale, however widely unaccepted their behavior is. If you can get your sense of social belonging satisfied by 100000 other pedophiles from all over the world on a social network, why should you conform to any widely recognized social standard? Why should you work on your problems when thousands of rape apologists are patting your back and reinforcing your delusions?

Finally, social networks exploit these weaknesses, exploit our sense of pride and our ideas of what is right and wrong. More polarized and controversial information leads to more discussion. More discussion leads to more social data. More social data leads to better ads. There is an incentive for social networks to push objectionable and worthless information. The relationship is perhaps indirect in that it just happens to be the best way to turn a profit, but we shouldn't let our social standards budge for a system that is designed to maximize a profit margin.

Multiple parties can be to blame for a problem, friend.

Whether the unwashed are hopeless or not, victim-shaming to protect a corporation is never a good look.

Don't swing too far.

Facebook needs some blame too.

This has also been my experience. For most of posts/comments I report(which I think shouldn't be on Facebook), I get the default reply "not against communist standards".

>Of course they do. People report.

Yes, but the damage has been done then. Parent is right. Facebook doesn't know what is being posted, only afterwards, when people tell them, then they know.

This is just a form of the child pornography scare that resonates with contemporary politics.

There isn't a significant portion of users that condone these threats. I will still be held against anyone not wanting to give facebook more control over content.