Letter to Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram - Brindisi Joins Family of Bianca Devins to Announce Major Push to Combat Violent & Graphic Content Across Social Media Platforms Like Facebook & Instagram

Letter

Mr. Mosseri:

I write on behalf of my community and the family of seventeen-year-old Bianca Devins of Utica, New York. As you are aware, Bianca was murdered on Sunday, July 14, 2019. The alleged perpetrator then posted extremely graphic and disturbing images of the crime on your platform, as well as others, images that remained visible for more than a week.

The pain of losing a child is unimaginable. But to have that pain exploited, mocked, and shared on social media is a trauma that no family should ever have to go through. I have heard heartbreaking stories of these graphic images being sent directly to Bianca's family members, including children. This type of harassment is not something we can abide. These images reportedly appeared more than a week later on Instagram's parent company, Facebook. Further, users report that when they attempted to flag the images as violating the Community Guidelines (Instagram) or Community Standards (Facebook), they received messages that the content could remain up with a sensitive content warning, or that the images did not violate Instagram's Community Guidelines at all. This is unacceptable.

I appreciate the work your staff has done to update my office and Bianca's family, and the actions you have taken so far to try to remove these horrific images from your platform. However, I believe more needs to be done. I am especially concerned about the training and manpower of your company's content reviewers. Employing 15,000 individuals to ensure community compliance across 1 billion monthly users does not strike me as adequate, and clearly in this case it was not enough. I am aware your company also relies on software to ensure compliance. However, as we have seen, users will find numerous ways to manipulate and distort images to circumvent your software. Human moderators in many ways are the last line of defense, but if they are not adequately trained or not able to keep up with the workload, these tragedies will continue to occur.

There also must be accountability for Instagram users who violate your company's Community Guidelines in such a despicable way. I am seeking your commitment to permanently ban users who share these images, and to the best of your ability to restrict these users IPs from accessing the app under a different username. I also need your assurance that Instagram will fully comply with local law enforcement should these users be prosecuted for aggravated harassment or other related crimes.

Finally, in order to obtain a full accounting and to protect other families from this kind of abuse, I am calling on your company to conduct an independent audit of this incident by a third party. This audit should include a timeline of the average response time to remove these photos, and a timeline of how long they appeared on the platform. Bianca's family is clear: they do not want another family to ever have to experience what they have gone through these past few weeks. Only through a full accounting of what happened in this case can we make sure it does not happen again. Once this audit is complete, I would ask that you share the results with Bianca's family and my office.

Americans cannot stand to see another senseless tragedy uploaded to this platform, and we owe it to Bianca, her family and my community to fight for answers and action. Thank you for your urgent attention to this matter.

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