Meta announces today that Instagram and Facebook are founding members of Take It Down: this is a new platform that NCMEC – National Center for Missing and Exploited Children – created with Meta’s financial support to prevent, in the future, , intimate images of young people are posted on participating apps.
If a young person has an intimate image of himself that is seen by others, the experience can be traumatic if shared without her consent. It’s even worse when someone tries to use these images to extort additional photos, sexual contact, or money – commonly known as sextortion.
Take It Down allows young people to regain control of their intimate images. People can go to TakeItDown.NCMEC.org and follow the instructions to submit a case and the platform will proactively search participating apps for intimate images of themselves. Take It Down assigns a unique hash function value – a numerical code – to the image or video privately and directly from your own device. After submitting the hash value to NCMEC, companies like Meta can use these values to search and prevent content from being published to their applications in the future.
Built to respect the privacy and security of young people’s data, Take It Down allows people to submit just a hash function value – rather than the intimate image or video itself – to the NCMEC. This process – hashing – transforms images or videos into an encoded format that cannot be viewed again, producing values that are anonymous and secure fingerprints.
With the launch of Take It Down, people of all ages can stop the spread of intimate images online, including:
- Young people under 18 are concerned that their content has or may be published online;
- Parents or trusted adults representing a teenager;
- Adults are concerned about pictures of you that were taken when you were under 18.
Take It Down builds on the success of platforms such as StopNCII, a platform developed with the South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) and over 70 NGOs worldwide, which helps adults stop the dissemination of their intimate images. online, a practice commonly referred to as “revenge porn”.
Meta does not allow, in its applications, content or behavior that exploits young people, including the publication of intimate images or sextortion activities. The company proactively works to prevent and stop the sharing of this content and inappropriate interactions between young people and suspicious accounts that try to take advantage of them. For example, by default, Meta places teens in the most protective privacy settings on Facebook and Instagram, working to prevent suspicious adults from finding and connecting with teens on those apps, and educating teens about the dangers of engaging with adults online. that they don’t know.
On Instagram, the company recently introduced some new features to make it even more difficult for suspicious adults to interact with teenagers. Now, these adults can no longer see teens’ accounts when scrolling through the list of people who have liked a particular post, nor will teens see these suspicious adults in their ‘likes’ list. Additionally, when someone comments on a teen’s post or identifies them in another post, the teen will be notified to review their privacy settings and have the option to prevent people from interacting with them through comments or tags.
More than 30 tools have been developed to support the safety of teens and families across Meta apps, including supervision tools that allow parents to limit the amount of time their children spend on Instagram and Meta Quest, and age verification technology that helps teens to appropriate experiences online.
Meta also provides resources for teens that inform them about the potential harms of taking intimate photos and ways to find help if they want to stop the spread of such content. Resources are also developed for parents and guardians so they can talk to their teens about how to protect themselves online, which can be found in the Safety Center and Family Center.
Families and young people are encouraged to use Take It Down to protect themselves and prevent the potentially traumatic dissemination of intimate images online.
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