Securing Sexts: Meta’s Proactive Measures Online

The non-consensual sharing of intimate images online remains a major challenge to user privacy. But Meta has announced a new way it plans to combat the spread of young people’s intimate images on its platforms.

Here’s what you should know about the new Take It Down platform and how Meta is involved…

Meta Joins Take It Down To Prevent Sextortion

Meta announced in a February 2023 press release that they will be joining an effort to stop and prevent the spread of young people’s intimate images online. Instagram and Facebook will be founding members of Take It Down, the new platform initiative from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

Take It Down is an online platform where young people can go and submit their case. Take It Down will hash images, so it can search for the hash values on the platforms that work with it. You do not need to submit any personal information in order to use the platform. The platform will search participating sites like Instagram and Facebook to remove those images and prevent them from being posted in the future. Anyone anywhere in the world can use Take It Down.

The service is designed for minors who want to remove intimate images of themselves from the internet, or adults who want to remove intimate images of themselves from when they were minors.

In its press release , Meta described its support for Take It Down, both technological and financial. The platform hopes to prevent crimes like sextortion, when someone uses intimate images as a threat for money or other items.

Intimate images, like those including nudity, and content that exploits young people, are already not allowed on Meta’s platforms. Meta’s work with NCMEC will hopefully prevent more content like this from being posted. The enforcement of the guidelines before this was largely retroactive instead of proactive.

Meta Also Announces Safety Update to Instagram

Instagram also introduced safety updates to make it more difficult for suspicious adults to interact with teens on the app including direct messages and comments. Teen accounts will also receive notifications to update their privacy settings if a suspicious adult tries to interact with their account.

These features are in addition to other safety features on Instagram, including many specifically for teens like activating parental supervision on teen Instagram accounts .

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Meta Is Working to Prevent Intimate Image Sharing

With two of the largest social media platforms in the world, Meta is a key player in Take It Down’s mission to prevent the sharing of young people’s intimate images online. Although both Facebook and Instagram have guidelines against sharing these images, it unfortunately happens, and this is another step to prevent it and give control of the images back to their owner.