Re: Why *should* Facebook act?
>how could we expect a Facebook moderator to know whether e.g. an image of a child in a bath, or kids running around at a naturist resort is or is not illegal?
Context is fairly important when a court decides if lower-grade stuff was indecent.
If you're a facebook moderator, looking at a reported image of a kid in a bath and all the comments basically say "Phwoooaaarrr", then use your gut.
Giving FB the benefit of the doubt though, I suspect that those images which weren't blocked were probably looked at in isolation (i.e. they looked at the image and not the comments, rest of the group etc) and in a hurry. It wouldn't surprise me if they were images that'd be innocent in another context.
Facebook should act, because they've taken it upon themselves to do so (not without pressure from Government of course).
But, at the same time, gov.uk should also act to tidy up the emotive, knee-jerk legislation we have and provide some actual fucking clarity in what is actually quite an important body of law.
People's lives get ruined by mere accusation of possession, so having the law so widely open to interpretation is stupid, and leads to situations like these where content platforms have no real way of knowing whether or not something would actually be illegal under law. All that does is make distribution of marginal cases easier, because some will inevitably slip through.
I think the ban on cartoons is stupid, but it doesn't really matter as long as they provide a clear definition so that filtering and detection can actually be done based on fact rather than supposition. With the added benefit that no-one's going to find themselves prosecuted for an innocent photograph - because the subsequent acquittal really clears their name in the eyes of the public.