Fury as child porn goes viral on Facebook with 16,000 'shares' and 4,000 'likes'

Facebook has sparked fury after a graphic child porn video went viral on the social network, reportedly being 'shared' over 16,000 times.

Thousands of users logged onto their accounts last night to find the horrifying footage appear on their personal news feed and instantly took to Twitter to vent their disgust.

According to users who saw the clip, apparently of a young girl being abused by a grown man, it had already been shared over 16,000 times and received almost 4,000 'likes'.

Even more disturbingly, users then began uploading and sharing screen grabs of the video on Twitter in an apparent bid to alert fellow Twitterati of the horrifying content.

Read more  after the cut...

Many more voiced their outrage on rival website Twitter at how the video could be smuggled past Facebook's state-of-the-art firewall, launched with much fanfare two years ago.

User Harmony wrote: 'theres a legitimate child porn video circulating on Facebook!! nearly 4k likes and over 16k shares in under 7 hours... this world is sick.'

Maddison Twatter wrote: 'There is child porn on my Facebook timeline... I'm so f******* angry."

Another user called Nicholas added: 'Someone posted child porn on Facebook and its spreading like wildfire. Why the **** would someone do that to a child.'

A Facebook spokesperson said: 'Nothing is more important to Facebook than the safety of the people that use our site, and this material has no place on Facebook.

“We have zero tolerance for child pornography being uploaded onto Facebook and are extremely aggressive in preventing and removing child exploitive content.”

“We are pleased that this material was reported to us quickly enabling its swift removal.”

But this disturbing underbelly of the popular social networking website is not a new revelation to the company, which until 2011 relied heavily on reports from its users about illegal activity.

Last year an exposé published by WND.com revealed a disturbing amount of child pornography being shared by predators on the social network.

Graphic photos of children, including infants and toddlers, were uncovered by the site, some taken from entire albums of children forced into acts by pedophiles.

Others too graphic to publish included photographs of children forced to have sex with each other, being raped by adults, and forced to expose their genitals to the camera.

Last May, the inclusion of Microsoft's PhotoDNA program helped to cull through images and data quickly in a bid to police the website and rid it of abuse.

Facebook said at the time the program was used to search for several thousand illegal images among the 200million uploaded each day, focusing on children under 12 as part of an initiative to battle 'the worst of the worst'.

The program is able to search for some of the thousands of photographs collected by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which helps to identify and help victims and cooperates with authorities on investigations into their origins.

Culled from Daily Mail UK