Facebook blasted again for not quickly removing child porn

Here we go again.

For the second time in a little more than a month, Facebook is being criticized for not quickly removing images that may be illegal.

On Thursday, The Times reported that Facebook didn't take down child pornography images and content promoting the Islamic State despite being notified that the content existed. According to The Times, Facebook algorithmically promoted some of the content. In the United Kingdom, distributing extremist content with reckless intent is illegal.

Reporters for The Times discovered the images and let Facebook know about them through the social network's reporting channels, but company officials didn't do anything about the content until the journalists said they were about to publish a story.

Mashable reached out to Facebook and will update the story if the company responds.

In March, Facebook found itself amid a stream of bad press after the BBC found child pornography images on the social network. When the BBC notified Facebook, Facebook reported the journalists to the police.

The reporters did wrangle an apology out of Justin Osofsky, Facebook's vice president of global operations, but the story calls into question the effectiveness of Facebook's takedown technology.

The company and others use a technique called "hashing" to tag content that violates Facebook's terms, and prevents identical images from being re-uploaded. Introduced in 2015, it was going to take some time for the hashing system to evolve to where it can catalogue images that appear on parts of the dark web where child pornography lurks.

That may explain why such images still appear on Facebook, though it doesn't explain why Facebook didn't take them down after they were notified.