Child Porn Removed From Facebook After NYPD Probe

A child pornography video circulated to Facebook users has been removed from nearly 70,000 servers nationwide after an investigation by the New York Police Department's computer crimes unit, police said Friday.

The clip, which shows a woman engaging in sex acts with a small boy about 3 or 4 years old, had a digital footprint linking it to Jamaica, police said. The same video also was distributed from the Netherlands six months ago. It's unclear where the video came from, or when it was made.

Certain Facebook users would get a notice that something had been posted on their page, but it was a link to the porn video, police said. The computer crimes unit tracked the video to a server company Facebook uses to distribute messages. Neither the server company nor Facebook is suspected of wrongdoing.

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, said as soon as the computer crimes team reported the incident, the company took steps to prevent further sharing of the video, removing it from Facebook's servers and working with the NYPD to remove it from their servers and partner servers. By Friday, the video had been wiped from the servers, he said.

"There is no place on Facebook for the kind of inappropriate content this video represents,'' Schnitt said.

Kelly said the department has referred the investigation to federal law enforcement. Both the NYPD and Facebook provided information to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

It is unclear how many people received the clip.

Copyright AP - Associated Press
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