Keeping youth and women safe on our apps has always been our priority. Over the past several years, we’ve developed several tools and taken various initiatives to provide a safer online experience for teens and families. On Safer Internet Day 2023, we launched the first phase of our #DigitalSuraksha campaign. We took another step forward in our endeavor to create a safer and inclusive internet by hosting our Digital Suraksha Summit. The summit was attended by Smriti Z Irani, Honourable Minister for Women and Child Development along with various creators, psychologists, educators, CSO partners and members of parenting communities. We also announced a new platform Take It Down, created by National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) with Meta’s support, to help young people tackle the issues of non-consensual intimate images.
During the summit, Smriti Irani participated in a fireside chat with Antigone Davis, Meta’s Vice President Global Head of Safety and Sandhya Devanathan, Vice President for Meta in India.
It is important that companies like Meta align with the government’s vision to keep people, especially women and youth, safe online. I would urge them to expand this important discussion to smaller cities of India – ensuring women and youth from every corner of the country feel safe to express themselves online and reap the benefits of the digital revolution that is sweeping the country today. I would also encourage companies like Meta to come forward and partner with the government agencies directly and responsibly on issues of women and child safety and mental health.
Smriti Z Irani, Union Minister for Women and Child Development
Take It Down Tackles Non-Consensual Images of Young People
As part of Meta’s support to NCMEC, Take It Down will soon be available in Hindi and several other Indian languages. Take It Down is a new platform to prevent young people’s intimate images from being posted online in the future.
When someone is subjected to the spread of their non-consensual images, their experience online can be scary and overwhelming. This can be even more traumatizing for young people when someone tries to misuse those images. To battle this issue and take back control of their intimate images, young people can go to TakeitDown.NCMEC.org to submit a case that will proactively search for their intimate images on participating apps.
The platform allows people to only submit a hash — rather than the intimate image or video itself — to NCMEC. Hashing turns images or videos into a coded form that can no longer be viewed, producing hashes that are secure digital fingerprints. Once the hash is generated, we can use those hashes to find any copies or the images or videos, take them down and prevent them from being posted on our apps in the future.
Keeping women and teens safe online is an industry-wide challenge, and we are committed to being a part of the solution. We take comprehensive steps to ensure the safety of women and teens not just on our platform, but online. We have policies and technology in place to safeguard women and teens, we offer tools to users, like blocking, comment filters and reporting. We also offer industry-leading resources developed with experts, and we helped found and support both StopNCII.org and NCMEC’s Take It Down — two programs that help adults and teens prevent the non-consensual sharing of intimate images not only on our platform but on all participating companies’ platforms.
Antigone Davis, Vice President, Global Head of Safety, Meta
Enabling Free and Safe Expression with Tools and Partnerships
As more youth take to our platforms to express themselves, we have partnered with Ministry of Women and Child Development to launch the #AmritGeneration campaign, which will encourage young people, many of whom are aspiring creators, to freely express their vision for the future.
Meta remains committed to driving digital inclusion in India through various programs and initiatives. Today, millions of women-led businesses and teens use our apps to express their authentic selves. For these women and teens to continue experiencing a platform that is enabling and empowering, there is a need to make online spaces safer. We are committed to building tools and resources that will make our apps and the internet more safe and inclusive.
Sandhya Devanathan, Vice President & Head (India), Meta
Over the years, we have launched several tools while building various age-appropriate measures and tools to ensure young people, women, parents and children continue to feel safe online. We now default teens under 18 into private accounts when they first join Facebook and Instagram. We launched a Family Centre to access supervision tools which contains educational resources curated by leading youth as safety, privacy and well-being experts for parents and guardians. Teens can restrict unwanted interactions on their accounts which hides comments on their posts from a person that has been restricted.
And we’ve partnered with third-party experts to keep people safe:
· G20 Stay Safe Online campaign with MeitY: We have created various assets and resources on online safety in more than five Indian languages. These resources have already reached more than 11 million people across India.
· Delhi Police: We provide digital literacy to 10,000 students and youth across various schools and colleges.
· UnGap: In partnership with Yuvaa, UnGap encourages parents and teens to have more meaningful conversations around online safety and wellbeing. The campaign has reached more than 44 million people.
· Digital Nagrik Pledge :Building on our partnership with the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), we provide a digital citizenship course to 10 million students and 1 million teachers. So far, more than 15,000 people in India have taken a pledge to become responsible digital citizens (Nagriks).
