A group dedicated to ending sexual harassment in the Marine Corps has called out Facebook for not doing enough to prevent the spread of so-called "revenge porn" on its network.
In an open letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg published Thursday, Marine veteran Erin Kirk-Cuomo said the company "has become the reliable host for group pages used to openly mock, disparage, denigrate, and demean the very women who have answered the call of service to our country."
Facebook recently came under fire when a bombshell report from March revealed that hundreds of Marines were sharing naked pictures of female service members without their permission in a private Facebook group called Marines United. A follow-up report from Business Insider revealed that the behavior had spread to other branches of the military and more private groups on and off Facebook.
The social network recently announced more reporting tools to weed out explicit photos, but Kirk-Cuomo argues that the company's policies remain "largely ineffective" and still don't prevent the spread of "nonconsensual intimate photo sharing" in private, invite-only groups.
"We applaud the updates in facial-recognition software in an effort to end the sharing of revenge pornography announced by Facebook last week," she wrote. "However, Facebook has been negligent in removing pages, groups, and users, that actively promote nonconsensual intimate photo sharing and incite sexual violence and harassment."
“There is no place on Facebook for this abhorrent activity and we appreciate those who have raised concerns about it," Facebook VP of global operations Justin Osofsky told Business Insider in a statement on Friday. "We want to have an open and safe environment on Facebook."
"We do not allow harassment and remove content that appears to purposefully target private individuals with the intention of degrading or shaming them," he said. "We also remove content that threatens or promotes sexual violence or exploitation. We encourage people to report content to us for review when they see something that should not be on Facebook, and also suggest reaching out to law enforcement directly if there is a situation in which the authorities can help.”
In her open letter, Kirk-Cuomo said that offending private groups have had to be reported "multiple times a day for weeks" to Facebook before action is taken, and she is asking the company to speed up its review times.
She also asks Facebook to "create closer relationships" with concerned members of the military "to effectively and quickly eliminate groups, pages, and users, in violation of both your service agreement and our military core values."
A Facebook spokesman told BI on Friday that the company has been in contact with Kirk-Cuomo and members of her advocacy group, "Not In My Marine Corps."
The spokesman said that Facebook has taken down the original Marines United group along with 10 additional spin-off groups, one page, and four user accounts for sharing explicit photos of military members without consent. Using its recently announced photo scanning technology, Facebook has also prevented over 8,000 attempts to share explicit photos that originated from the Marines United group, the spokesman said.
(Editors note: This story has been updated with a statement from Facebook VP of global operations Justin Osofsky and additional information from a company spokesman.)
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