It’s likely you’ll never see this content…

But if you do, this is crucial: ‘Report it. Don’t share it.’

The “it” in “Report it. Don’t share it.” — a public awareness campaign Facebook launched this week — is child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the accurate term for what is typically called “child pornography” in the United States.

“The prevalence of this content on our platform is very low,” Facebook researchers report, “meaning sends and views of it are very infrequent. But when we do find this type of violating content, regardless of the context or the person’s motivation for sharing it, we remove it and report it to NCMEC.” They’re referring to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to which US-based Internet companies are required by federal law to report this criminal content, regardless of country of origin.

How prevalent

As for CSAM’s prevalence, in Q1 this year (the latest figure available), it was 0.05%, meaning that, “of every 10,000 views of content on Facebook, we estimate no more than 5 of those views,” according to Facebook’s transparency report. Another way to look at prevalence is: Compared with the 5.5 million pieces of bullying and harassment content that moderation teams “actioned,” 812,000 pieces of CSAM was removed from Facebook (98.1% of those pieces…