- Meta launched a new anti-sextortion campaign in partnership with Thorn.
- The campaign is aimed at providing teens and parents with tips on how to handle and protect against sextortion.
As the world celebrated Safer Internet Day on January 6, Meta announced two initiatives designed to support young people and families as they explore the Internet.
The first initiative is dubbed 'Take it Down'.
According to Meta, the platform allows teens to take control of their intimate imagery and prevent it from spreading online.
The second initiative was the launch of a new anti-sextortion campaign in partnership with Thorn, aimed at providing teens and parents with tips on how to handle and protect against sextortion.
Meta said Take It Down is a first-of-its-kind program from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).
It builds off of the success of platforms like StopNCII, which helps prevent those seeking to exploit people from sharing adults’ intimate images online.
"The program was first launched in English and Spanish but is now expanding to many more languages making it accessible to millions of teens around the world," Meta said.
The company said the programme is designed to help teens worried that their content might or has been posted online, adults worried about images taken of them when they were under 18, and parents or trusted adults who operate Meta products on behalf of a young person.
Meta also announced they partnered with Thorn to update their Stop Sextortion hub, offering new tips and resources for teens, parents and teachers on how to prevent and handle sextortion.
“It can be frightening and overwhelming to have private, intimate images revealed to others, particularly for young people," Sylvia Musalagani, Head of Safety Policy for Africa, Middle East and Turkey at Meta said.
“As an organisation, we are announcing new efforts to ensure that our teens have control over what they post and that parents and teens are aware of how to avoid and deal with sextortion. Non-consensual sharing or even threatening to share intimate images without consent is against our policies and nobody should ever have to experience this."
Musalagani said Meta has developed more than 30 tools and features to help support the safety of teens and families.
"Late last year, we launched the Family Centre with supervision tools and an Education hub in Kenya to support safer and more positive online experiences for families," she said.
Musalagani said for one to access Take It Down, they can submit a case to have their intimate photos on participating apps proactively searched for by visiting TakeItDown.NCMEC.org and following the instructions.
"The feature secretly and directly from their device gives each picture or video a distinct hash value, which is a numerical code," Musalagani said.