Reporting the video does nothing

Since reporting the video did nothing, I am now writing this public article about my experience.

Since there is no option to report copyright violations unless you are the rights holder, I reported it in the Other category, and got this standard response in my Facebook Support Inbox:

Thanks for letting us know about this. The video was reviewed, and though it doesn't go against one of our specific Community Standards, you did the right thing by letting us know about it. We understand that it may still be offensive or distasteful to you, so we want to help you see less of things like it in the future.

From the list above, you can block X-Girl directly, or you may be able to unfriend or unfollow them. We also recommend visiting the Help Center to learn more about how to control what you see in your News Feed. If you find that a person, group or Page consistently posts things you don’t want to see, you may want to limit how often you see their posts or remove them from your Facebook experience.

We know these options may not apply to every situation, so please let us know if you see something else you think we should review.

I submitted another review request, and got pretty much the same result:

Thank you for requesting a review.

A specialist from our team reviewed the video again and confirmed that it doesn't go against any of our Community Standards.

We base our Community Standards on input from the people who use Facebook around the world, as well as experts.

So, as it would seem, Facebook currently does very little to prevent pirated content, and do not even care when brought to their attention.

I was unable to re-open my support request after this "specialist" review. Instead, I now reported the page as fake, and I am now waiting to see what happens about that. The page is obviously fake, since it does not represent anything, except spam perhaps.

Pirated content is not allowed

Pirated content is obviously not allowed, it should take no "specialist" knowledge of the Community Guidelines to figure that one out. However, Point 20 in the community guidelines specifically mentions this issue:

20. Intellectual Property

Facebook takes intellectual property rights seriously and believes they are important to promoting expression, creativity, and innovation in our community. You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. However, before sharing content on Facebook, please be sure you have the right to do so. We ask that you respect other people’s copyrights, trademarks, and other legal rights. We are committed to helping people and organizations promote and protect their intellectual property rights. Facebook’s Terms of Service do not allow people to post content that violates someone else’s intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark. We publish information about the intellectual property reports we receive in our bi-annual Transparency Report, which can be accessed at https://transparency.facebook.com/

The problem is, users can not report this content and have it taken down, not even when the pages uploading it are fake or spammy in nature.

Facebook content moderation

To avoid taking part in spreading speculation and thereby fake news about Facebook content moderators (a few documentaries does that already), it is important to understand the huge task it is to moderate a platform like Facebook.

This is hopefully just a mistake by a single moderator team that was too quick to dismiss the report without looking properly at the reported content.

And... I highly doubt the page in question has obtained permission from the copyright holder to upload the video.

When I discover problematic content, I usually report it. Sometimes I have even gone a step further and written a negative review of the page. That is probably a bad idea, as your reviews/comments might show up in your friends news feed.

Generally, Facebook does take action. But, recently, depending on what you are reporting, it seems their review has been a little slow. In particular, I have reported a lot of scammer ads, and only few of them has been removed while the rest of my reports still remain open, even days after filing them.

I am sure Facebook will improve, so we will just have to show some patience.

This article discusses the content review process for those interested: Hard Questions: Who Reviews Objectionable Content on Facebook — And Is the Company Doing Enough to Support Them?

Links

1. How do I report copyright infringement on Facebook?

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