During a Sunday interview on CNN, disgraced former chief of security for Facebook Alex Stamos called for mass censorship of conservatives on Facebook even though he allowed child pornography to thrive on the platform.
During a Sunday interview on CNN, disgraced former chief of security for Facebook Alex Stamos called for mass censorship of conservatives on Facebook. This, despite his own failures with content moderation, as child pornography was widely distributed during his watch as chief of security.
Stamos is now an adjunct professor at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. During his tenure at the social media giant, Stamos was involved in multiple controversies over what Facebook allowed on their platform and was widely criticized for failing to remove sexualized images of children.
During Santos' tenure at Facebook, the BBC “reported dozens of photos to Facebook, but more than 80% were not removed. They included images from groups where users were discussing swapping what appeared to be child abuse material.”
According to the BBC in 2017, some of the images they reported were from "groups where users were discussing swapping what appeared to be child abuse material."
Rather than doing anything about the images, Facebook allegedly reported the BBC journalists to the authorities and cancelled an interview. Facebook then issued a statement: "It is against the law for anyone to distribute images of child exploitation."
According to the BBC, out of the 100 images they flagged, only 18 were removed by the tech giant and the journalists were told that the other images did not violate Facebook's "community standards."
Facebook's rules forbid convicted sex offenders from having accounts. Yet, the BBC discovered five convicted pedophiles with facebook profiles, even though Facebook rules prohibit convicted sex offenders from having accounts. The BBC reported all of the accounts to Facebook and none of them were taken down.
Anne Longfield, the Children's Commissioner for England told the BBC after seeing the results of their research, "I have been very disturbed by what I have seen, very disappointed that one year on we are still seeing images that are very sexualised, totally in my view unacceptable."
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) also criticized Facebook after seeing the BBC's findings. "Facebook's failure to remove illegal content from its website is appalling and violates the agreements they have in place to protect children," a spokeswoman told the BBC.
She added, "It also raises the question of what content they consider to be inappropriate and dangerous to children."
Stamos was also criticized for many other failings in Facebook security during his tenure. The former Facebook chief of security, failed to address disinformation campaigns in the Philippines that targeted and harassed journalists, which was reported on by CNN. Ironically Stamos targeted and harassed conservative media outlets on a Sunday CNN panel.
“OANN and Newsmax, which are carried by all the major cable networks, who are trying to now outflank Fox on the right, because the moment Fox introduced any kind of realism into their reporting immediately, a bunch of people chose to put themselves into a sealed ecosystem and they can do that both on cable and they can do it online. And that becomes a huge challenge of figuring out. How do you bring those people back into the mainstream of fact-based reporting and try to get us all back into the same consensual reality.“
The host and other member of the CNN panel agreed, but then Stamos spoke over the other panel commentator to continue by comparing conservative media to ISIS. Another bit of irony given that Stamos was the man in charge of security for the company the UN called out for playing a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. The genocide in 2016 and 2017 let to thousands being killed and over 700,000 fleeing and becoming refugees in other countries.
“…the number one challenge from a content perspective was the abuse of social media by the Islamic state… there was a collaboration between the tech companies and between the tech companies and law enforcement to make it impossible for them to use the internet, to recruit and radicalize mostly young Muslim. And at the time around the world, now we're talking about domestic audience in the United States and the challenge is going to be partially that.”
“ISIS did not have a domestic constituency in the United States Congress, but there is over half of the Republicans in Congress voted to overturn the election. Um, and there will be a continual political pressure on the companies to not take it seriously. So I think first, you have to focus on those violent extremists and those companies have to be brave in that way.”
Yet, Stamos, the man who said, in his security role for Facebook during the 2016 election that he deserved “as much blame (or more) as any other exec at the company," for Facebook's failures to address Russia interfering in the 2016 election, spent the entire CNN segment discussed ways of censoring conservatives.
Stamos even admitted that some conservative commentators have a larger audience than CNN during his CNN panel spot.
“…we have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences. There are people on YouTube, for example, that have a larger data, a larger audience than daytime CNN, and they are extremely radical and pushing extremely radical views.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Yt4S6hoJaRc?start=269&feature=oembed
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