Three more pages purportedly containing explicit photos of Maine girls appeared Thursday night on Facebook, and a person who responded to questions posted to an earlier page said all the photos were put up with the consent of the girls depicted in them.

“I’ll probably be in jail soon to be honest lol,” the person wrote in an email.

Facebook pages earlier in the week containing nude or sexually explicit photos of young Maine girls prompted investigations by several law enforcement agencies around the state and an outpouring of criticism on social media. The pages created Thursday night showed girls who were scantily clad.

Law enforcement officials believe the five Facebook pages with the photos of Maine girls that had been reported by Thursday morning and subsequently taken down are related, but they haven’t identified who might be responsible for the postings, which were first reported to local police Tuesday. The pages included dozens of sexually explicit images, many of them selfies of girls, and said that many of them were from Maine.

All of those earlier pages had been taken down by Facebook as of Thursday afternoon.

“I think someone’s getting scared, and they’re not having the ability to get out what they want to get out because that public outcry is shutting them down fast,” said Detective David Armstrong of the Maine State Police Computer Crimes Unit, which is leading the investigation. “The public has been right on it. People are seeing it and they’re saying, ‘Call in, call in,’ and Facebook has had enough of it. They’re shutting it down.”

The person responding to a Morning Sentinel message sent to one of the earlier pages claimed that the girls shown in the photos it contained were seeking attention.

“They undress themselves. They open the camera app on their phones themselves. They get the lighting juuuuust right themselves. They send the pictures and even videos all on their own,” the responder wrote, adding later, “Don’t be fooled, they ALL jumped at the chance to be put up, hoping to become the next Kim Kardashian.”

Alicia Barnes, a digital media consultant in Waterville who saw the pages Wednesday and was among several people who reported them to Facebook, said it’s a classic case of the perpetrator blaming the victim.

“He’s accusing them of what he’s doing. He’s possibly a sociopath,” Barnes said.

In an emailed response to a request for comment Thursday, a Facebook representative said the safety of its users is foremost and the company enlists them to help police the site.

“Nothing is more important to Facebook than the safety of the people that use our site and this material has absolutely no place on Facebook,” the official said. “We maintain a robust reporting infrastructure that leverages over 1.4 billion people who use our site to keep an eye out for offensive or potentially dangerous content. This reporting infrastructure includes report links on pages across the Facebook site, systems to prioritize the most serious reports, and a trained team of reviewers who respond to reports and remove content that violates our standards.”

Police investigating who posted the pictures and how they ended up on the pages have received tips and leads, but there are no suspects in the case, Armstrong said.

FACEBOOK ‘TAKING IT SERIOUSLY’

Police have been in touch with Facebook about getting information from the account used to set up the pages, Armstrong said.

“They’ve agreed to do the best they can to get that information out to us in less than the standard time. They’re taking it seriously,” he said.

State police are continuing to work with local Maine law enforcement agencies, including the Skowhegan Police Department, the Oakland Police Department and the Somerset County Sheriff’s Office, to identify some of the girls in the pictures originally posted on the page. Only a handful of girls had been identified as being from Maine by Thursday.

A total of five pages with similar titles were reported to the company beginning Tuesday and throughout the day Wednesday. The original page was taken down late Tuesday after about a dozen law enforcement agencies contacted Facebook.

One of the pages listed an email address at yandex.com, a Russian search engine, and the invitation to viewers to “Email or inbox me. I’ll take care of your ex.”

Barnes, the Waterville media consultant, said it is well known on Internet forums that hackers can hide behind yandex.com accounts because of the limited information required to sign up for one.

“It’s going to take awhile (to get that information),” she said. “I think that’s normal. What we need to do is take the lessons from this and put them into place.”

Facebook has a community standards page, where it explains that certain content may be removed if it is believed to pose a risk of physical harm or a threat to public safety.

Barnes said the community standards don’t do enough to regulate content.

“Somebody needs to take Facebook to task on this to have a better mechanism to handle this stuff,” she said. “I think it’s a bigger issue than what the state thinks it is.”

NEW PAGES TARGET SPECIFIC GIRL

When the new batch of pages of pages appeared Thursday night, Barnes said she was reporting them as harassment because they included threats to release photos of a girl in Maine who had set up a page in support of victims.

Barnes suspects a couple of copycat pages are in play because three new pages were out there, not just one.

Facebook’s standards are broken down into eight categories, including direct threats, self-injury, dangerous organizations, bullying and harassment, attacks on public figures, criminal activity, sexual exploitation, and violence and regulated goods, which pertains to the sale of firearms, alcohol and drugs.

“We remove content that threatens or promotes sexual violence or exploitation,” the page on sexual exploitation and violence states. “This includes the sexual exploitation of minors, and sexual assault. To protect victims and survivors, we also remove photographs or videos depicting incidents of sexual violence and images shared in revenge or without permissions from the people in the images.”

The website also outlines a policy on nudity: “We restrict the display of nudity because some audiences within our global community may be sensitive to this type of content – particularly because of their cultural background or age.”

The policy states that photos displaying genitalia will be removed from the site, as will explicit images of sexual intercourse, but that nudity is acceptable in some cases, such as images of women who are breastfeeding or photographs of paintings or sculptures.

The consequences for violating the community standards vary depending on the severity of the violation and the person’s history on Facebook, according to the website.

“For instance, we may warn someone for a first violation,” the company’s standards page states. “But if we continue to see further violations, we may restrict a person’s ability to post on Facebook or ban the person from Facebook.”

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