Facebook guide to reporting illegal or time-critical content on their site.

Those who read this blog regularly could justifiably conclude that I don't like Facebook much.  Not one generally to keep quiet about Things That Piss Me Off (mental note - should add that as a tag), Facebook have featured quite highly in my list of blog rants to date.

But - thanks to a nice lady called Rosa who Josh Marsh from iPlatform introduced me to - I have found out the answers to some crucial Facebook questions.  Thanks for sticking with it Rosa: I'm sure it wasn't easy to get this level of definition from your organisation.

My doubt arose as eModeration was fine-tuning its escalation process. My question was this: how can moderators report illegal content to Facebook in a way which will ensure that it is afterwards retrievable for the law enforcement authorities?

OK, if you don't work in moderation or community management, or are always fortunate enough to use a tool such as Conversocial or its rivals, which will keep copies of deleted material, you'll probably not understand why this is a problem.  So I'll illustrate.  Imagine one of our moderators comes across a child abuse image posted to Facebook, and has only Facebook admin tools at his/her disposal.  The moderator obviously needs to remove it from our client's Page immediately, and to commence the emergency escalation procedures, which involve contacting the local police. But how to provide evidence?  S/he can't download the image to his/her own machine - that would be illegal and inadvisable for many reasons.  How can s/he be sure that the file with remain on Facebook servers to be produced as evidence?

If you've tested out the reporting procedures on Facebook, you'll be aware that the options very according to the content type and its location.   If you want to report a profile for example, you're offered different categories than those if you report a image.  And, to say the least, it's confusing. How would you report a bomb threat, for example?  Is a child abuse image counted as pornography? What about a suicide threat?

So I asked Rosa for a guide to how to report the various kinds of illegal and/or time critical user generation content we come across.  Her final answer was clear enough to be really helpful, so I thought I'd share it for the use of others: this is what she said.  Please be aware that this advice was offered to a UK based organisation - some of it is UK specific.

First and foremost, if you ever have a concern about imminent harm or physical or sexual abuse (current or past, of a child), you should always be contacting the police in your area. Below you will find a breakdown of the reporting flow and how you can best report content to Facebook, and how we work with other agencies and law enforcement to escalate the most serious of issues.  

1)  Illegal Images of children:   In the event that you find illegal images of children (or IIOC) on Facebook, you should report it to our team using our robust reporting system.   This includes reporting the corresponding group, photo or event as 'Nudity/Pornography.'  Report links are located in every piece of  content on Facebook.  Our specialized team of experts will escalate any reports of IIOC to The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) when they come across them.   Facebook has a relationship with NCMEC where we provide them with the information relating to illegal accounts to disseminate  to the appropriate local police force for further investigation.  

2)  Suicide Threats:   How do I help someone who has posted suicidal content on the site?
If you have encountered a direct threat of suicide on Facebook, please...
If you have encountered a direct threat of suicide on Facebook, please immediately contact law enforcement.

    * For reports in the United States, we recommend that you contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a 24/7 hotline, at 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If possible, please encourage the person who posted the content to contact Lifeline as well.
    * For reports in the United Kingdom and Ireland, we recommend that you contact Samaritans at 08457 90 90 90 (UK), or 1850 60 90 90 (Republic of Ireland), or email jo@samaritans.org.
    * For reports in Norway, we recommend that you encourage the person who posted the content to contact Kirkens SOS at http://www.kirkens-sos.no/ or call 815 33 300.
    * View a list of suicide prevention hotlines in other countries by visiting http://www.befrienders.org and choosing from the drop-down menu at the top of the page.

Learn about how to identify and respond to warning signs of suicidal behavior online at the following addresses:

    * http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/GetHelp/WhatifSomeoneIKnowNeedsHelp.aspx
    * http://www.samaritans.org/your_emotional_health/worried_about_someone.aspx

You can also report these by filling out this form:  http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=suicidal_content

 

3)  Sex offenders using Facebook:   As stated in our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, convicted sex offenders are prohibited from registering for our service. Once we are able to verify a user’s status as a sex offender, we immediately disable their account. When an account is disabled, the profile and all information associated with it are immediately made inaccessible to other Facebook users. What this means is that the user effectively disappears from the Facebook service and will not be able to reactivate their account.

Sex offenders can be reported here:  http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=wos_sex_offender , or by contacting CEOP through their ClickCEOP application

4)  Terrorist Content:   If you find material that promotes terrorist behavior or that raises funds for a terrorist organization, Facebook strongly encourages you to report this here - http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=terrorist_content .  

Keep it on file.

Update 02/01/2011: From the Social Networking Safety LinkedIn group, Jennifer Perry has added some clarification of the law as regards extraction of data:  "Currently, all ISP have to keep data for specified period of time - as do banks, telcos, e-commerce sites etc.

"In the UK under the Regulatory Investigative Powers Act the police can request IP addresses (like police ask for telephone numbers without a warrant). If they want to see the content of old emails/postings they need a search warrant if they want current content, they need an interception warrant.

"For search warrants, it is up to the court system to judge if the police have enough cause to warrant viewing content - not the police. The Home Office has to approve the Interception - which are used sparingly (approximately only about 2k a year)."  

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Giddy Social Whirl: The Round-Up

A quick guide to the bits and bobs you may have missed this week, while you were doing that stuff you do.

Yikes! Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook fan page was hacked - now ain't that ironic? Shortly afterwards - and entirely coincidentally we're certain - Facebook announced its plan to offer secure HTTPS connections.

Meanwhile, while batting away rumours of a Facebook-branded phone, the Social Media Gargantuan® launched a new ad unit. Sponsored Stories tell you (twice) when your friends have interacted with a brand. As the WSJ points out, it's kind of like Beacon, only this time no-one seems all that fussed.

Our friends at Conversocial dish the skinny on social media management tools, while Hilton Barbour tips us the wink on what to look for in a community manager.

Jason Falls drills down into Facebook's new messaging platform and unpacks new research on what CMOs think about social media (clue: look to the bottom line, dummies).

There are are 5 (count'em) immutable laws of community-centric organizations to ponder - and all-round CM star @rhappe considers the conundrum "Community Management: Art or Science?"

Elsewhere, the Real Names vs. Usernames debate continues apace, and over at FreshNetworks they're mulling the big regulation changes coming soon to social media.

Finally, something for the weekend. Social Media addiction: are YOU at risk?

Enjoy!

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It's Community Manager Appreciation Day!

Being a community manager means often working in the background and your achievements not being recognised; take this opportunity to give yourself or your staff a slap on the back!

To celebrate the second annual Community Manger Appreciation Day, we've arranged a get-together in London, open to all those connected in some way with community management.  Hope to see lots of you there :-)

And if - like many people -  you're wondering  what a community manager actually does every day .. we've collected together some great blog posts which give some definition to this far-reaching and varied job title.

Blaise Grimes-Viort: A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

Gigoam.com: A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

Neighbourhood Link: A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

What Watch: A Day in the Life of  Your Friendly Community Manager

MMORPG.com : A Day in the Life of a Community Manager

And if you've read those, and you're still considering whether it might be the right job for you, here's Fresh Networks on the pros and cons of community management .

Finally, eModeration would like to give a big shout-out to community managers and moderators who deal with emergency escalations on a daily basis. Who actually save or improve lives, and occasionally get the baddies put behind bars.

Looking through user generated content, we are faced with a lot of distressing content every day, and sometimes that content is illegal. With the right procedures in place, it gets reported to the authorities, and community managers can play a part in (for example) combating traffic in child abuse images, or else they catch a suicide threat and are able to report it to the police - who may save a life that turns out to be worth living after all.

If you're an active member of an online community, why not start a thread today saying thanks to the unseen people behind it who are helping to shape and enrich your experience?  You'll make their day.

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What are your children seeing online? EU Kids Online report shows disturbing evidence.

This week, the BBC’s current affairs programme Panorama looked at the premature sexualisation of children – and unsurprisingly, much of it focused on their online experiences.

The programme drew heavily on a report published three months ago by EU Kids Online, a research project based at the London School of Economics which surveyed 23,000 children aged 9 - 16 last year. The report didn’t get as much coverage as it deserved at the time of its launch, so we thought we’d take another look; while some of its findings are more cheering than you might have expected, others are worth pondering further.

According to the research, conducted by Prof Sonia Livingstone of the LSE’s department of media and communications, 12 per cent of children said they had been bothered or upset by an online experience – including encountering pornography, sexual or bullying messages and potentially harmful user-generated content, like pro-anorexia, hate or self-harm sites.

The younger the children were, the more likely they were to report being upset by these kind of encounters, and - depressingly, but perhaps predictably - parents were more often than not unaware that their child was in difficulties or distress. For example, over half the parents whose child had been bullied online had not realised what was going on.

But the report was certainly not all doom and gloom. Researchers found that online bullying is in fact relatively uncommon when compared with the incidence of real-life bullying. And many children say they find online communication easier to manage than face-to-face interactions which, as they reach their teens, can become a minefield of awkwardness and embarrassment. Online interactions can take the pressure off, giving teenagers time to reflect and prepare: half those surveyed felt more able to be themselves online than offline.

Indeed, even when considering the 12% of children who’d been upset by something they’d encountered on the net, the researchers - perhaps fearful of stoking the moral panic around children’s internet safety - were keen to point out the flipside: that the majority of children say they had not been disturbed by an online experience.

Hmm. Of course, it’s important to avoid sensationalising this issue – to do so would risk diminishing its real importance. But it’s perhaps worth unpacking that figure of 12%, and considering whether we should really allow ourselves to relax.

1 in 8 sounds pretty low. Extrapolate those figures within an average UK classroom, however, and 3 or 4 children in that room will have been exposed to something that’s upset them. If one of those 3 or 4 is your child, you’re not going to be comforted by the fact that they’re in a minority.

It’s worth noting, too that this figure is at variance with research undertaken by Psychologies magazine last year, which found that, by the age of ten, 1 in 3 children had seen pornography online.

Now, these two headline figures aren’t directly comparable – the Psychologies research asked children if they’d seen inappropriate content, while the LSE research asked them if they’d been upset by what they’d seen. But this, in itself, raises another point worth making.

The report focuses primarily on the self-reported perceptions of the children who were surveyed. This kind of research is absolutely vital when trying to get inside the heads of the kids themselves - but it also needs to be treated with caution.

Some children, for example, don’t yet have the skills for defining their own experiences in words; others lack the toolkit for processing their own emotions. Others may unconsciously filter their responses, perhaps unwilling to admit to themselves or others that they’ve been hurt or embarrassed.

And sometimes, harmful experiences are only defined as such when we mature and gain perspective on our lives – which can be years, even decades after the event.

So, while some of the reports findings are heartening, others perhaps risk underplaying what is at stake. It’s not time to relax quite yet. As the LSE researchers commented, the only way for children to develop online safety skills is to actually spend time on the net - it’s the job of all of us to ensure that they can develop these vital skills in environments which allow them to grow, explore and mature, but which protect them from lasting harm.

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Join us for drinks for the London Community Appreciation Day 2011

Last year, Jeremiah Owyang suggested a day dedicated to celebrating the hard work Community Managers do. In his words:

"On Community Manager Appreciation Day (Jan 24th, 2011), just send a genuine thank you to those (at your company, or someone who has helped you as a customer) that are working to make a difference in how companies build relationships with their customers."

Being a Community Manager is an often challenging experience, and rarely appreciated for the vital function it is. The Community Manager fields questions, helps community members all day long, and soaks up a lot of negativity and pressure. The role can cover being a writer, host, enforcer, diplomat, negotiator, therapist or analyst, sometimes all of those and many more in the same day.

Now, a year on, it's almost that time again, and there is a little social event in London organised for Community & Social Media Managers and their supporters to get together. Don't be shy - come along and introduce yourself. All are welcome, and it's a great chance to mingle and swap experiences and learnings.

We will be meeting on the 24th of January 2011 from 6.30pm, upstairs at the Blue Posts near Soho.

The full address is:

81 Newman Street
W1T 3ET London
United Kingdom

View Larger Map

You can sign up to attend here: (tickets are free, but the bar isn't!)

Online Ticketing for London Community Manager Appreciation Day 2011 powered by Eventbrite

We'd love to see you there!

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eModeration publishes white paper ‘A Guide to Managing and Moderating Customer Review Sites’

As I mentioned on my post yesterday about the recent case of an Apple reseller currently suing a customer who complained about their service in a public forum, dealing with negative reviews can be ... well, tricky.





Many brands and community are inviting reviews onto their sites, and with good reason: a well-managed community of reviewers can bring huge benefits to a brand's website.  But it's important to give a lot of thought to the process.  How do you respond to criticism?  What to do if you suspect astro-turfing, or an orchestrated campaign against an establishment?  And what if it becomes an online war between the two parties, and it's taking place on your site?

That's where our new white paper ‘A Guide to Managing and Moderating Customer Review Sites’ comes in.  We give advice to brands on how to manage a reviewer community, how to spot fake reviews, and how to respond to negative feedback.

The paper, like all our white papers, free to download as a pdf from our website and also available as a free eBook, includes sections on:

• Setting up a review site, including establishing guidelines, and terms and conditions
• Spotting and dealing with fake reviews
• Managing the reviewer community, including rewarding star reviewers
• Listening to and acting on feedback, even when it’s negative; and using insight gained from reviews to inform product strategy and development
• Moderating reviews, including reinforcing terms of use, the right to reply for brands, and avoiding a censorial approach.

“Research shows that consumers are likely to check out online reviews prior to purchasing products or services, even from well-known brands. They can be a very powerful deciding factor in their eventual purchase decisions. Some brands are struggling with how to manage reviews and, importantly, how to listen to feedback and use it to benefit the brand. Those that do it well will see the benefit of engaging consumers in the long term.”  Tamara Littleton, CEO of eModeration

We hope you'll find the white paper a useful reference, and please get in touch with us (or comment below) if you'd like any further help or can contribute on the subject in any way.

Thanks very much to Venessa Paech (Community Manager of Lonely Planet) and our client Evleen Price (eBusiness Marketing Manager of The Camping and Caravanning Club), who were kind enough to share their opinions and advice.

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How NOT to deal with an angry customer in the social media arena

Last week I was asked eModeration's opinion of this story about a Greek Apple reseller Systemgraph, who are suing a customer who complained - possibly with justification - about the damage they caused to his machine whilst supposedly fixing it.  You may have heard the tale: the unhappy Mr Papadimitriadis posted his story on a forum, and in return, the company is suing him for 200,000 Euros for reputational damage. According to their statement on the AV Club forum, the law suit was in response to an "organised attempt to slander and insult" the company via social media sites, blogs and forums. The Twitterati have been enjoying this hugely - a post quoted by the article reads:  "In defense of #Systemgraph, their feelings were very hurt. 200,000 Euros is a bargain considering how hurt their feelings were."

The fact that this case is actually going to court gives many reasons for concern, not the least of which is whether it will now be possible to complain about anything, anywhere on the Internet and not be sued.  But I'm most interested right now in the customer service side to this case.

What should Systemgraph have done?  They should have engaged with their angry customer, tried to take it out of the public arena asap, and done their level best to get the problem sorted.  At the end of the day, it would have been far wiser to calculate the cost of the potential reputational damage of failing to resolve the problem versus the cost of the computer in question.  Not the mention the potential PR gain of turning an angry customer around.  Does it really, actually matter that much if they genuinely believe they didn't damage his computer?  How about 'goodwill payments' and 'the customer is always right'?  Taking the customer to court and suing him, frankly seems like reputational suicide.

How should you engage with customers who slate your product or service?  What if they are battling you - or with each other - on your own site?  eModeration's new white paper (to be published on this blog tomorrow) will provide a guide on how to set up a review site, handle and moderate reviews, act on feedback and use it to your advantage.

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Social media is not just for Christmas - top tips for keeping it alive and well through 2011

There it was, at the foot of your corporate bed on Dec 25th. Your best ever present from Santa ... a brand new, shiny community website/Facebook Page/Twitter feed. Batteries included, ready assembled by your marketing dev team and sparklingly beautiful.

But now the holiday is over, and in the bleak first days of January, reality starts to creep in. Social media is for life, not just for Xmas.

How are you best to look after your new toy? We've got a few do's and don't for social media owners:


DON'T use it as a broadcast medium. Unless you've got a really good reason not to do so, allow your community to initiate discussions on your wall. If you're tweeting or posting updates on behalf of your brand, ask questions. Respond to people. Welcome them. It's meant to be the start of a beautiful relationship.


DO allocate resources to it - according to recent research by AT Kearney into the Facebook performance of the world's top 50 brands, not allocating proper/time resources is the biggest mistake, made by 38% of US marketing professionals.

DON'T forget to listen to complaints, and act on them appropriately. Set up your customer service escalation path and get back to people quickly with a response or an appropriate channel. AT Kearney's report claimed that 89 percent of consumer replies on company Facebook sites went unanswered. Ouch.

DON'T treat your community like idiots. If people are telling you on your Facebook page that you are fobbing them off with a standard response  - please don't then fob them with a standard response.

DO set aside budget for moderation and community management. It's remarkable how quickly that shiny new toy can get broken and covered in dirt. And if you are moderating in-house, please plan ahead for holiday periods ...

There is of course, a great deal more advice that we, and many others can give. But the above list are Good Things to Do, and if you stick to them, who knows what Santa may have in his sack for you next year?

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