Their partnership with StopNCII.org can help prevent unwanted intimate images from surfacing online—without you having to share the actual photos.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp, launched a $5 billion project to keep women safe on its platforms. In an online press briefing, Meta’s Global Head of Women’s Safety Cindy Southworth and APAC Head of Safety at Meta Shireen Vakil explained the new updates and partnerships to ensure community safety.
READ ALSO: Stay Cautious: Facebook Has Rebranded To Meta—What Does This Mean?
Besides comment controls, privacy checkups, tag and timeline reviews, and snooze and unfollow features, they’ve also partnered with StopNCII.org to prevent posting harmful images of women, also known as “revenge porn.”
“When someone’s intimate images were shared without her permission, it can be devastating, Southworth shares. “It has long been our policy to remove non-consensual intimate images, sometimes referred to, erroneously, as revenge porn.”
Hash technology
According to Southworth, images like this are usually created with consent, while women are in trusted relationships. “But now that the relationship has ended, they are terrified that images are waiting to be shared,” she continues.
As a “proactive” solution to ensure unwanted images don’t surface on Facebook and Instagram, concerned women can create a case on stopNCII.org. It offers a tool featuring hash generating technology, converting a media file to an alphanumeric code.
“It’s created from the image. So no one shares the images, they don’t share them with us, as a tech company, and they don’t share them with stopNCII.org, Southworth explains. “Those images stay in their device, they create that unique hash, and that hash is sent to stopncii.org, and they forward that to the tech partners.”
Then, Facebook and Instagram, the only Meta platforms so far with this protocol, will block the media file to post.
Protection for public figures
In addition, more protection for public figures, who are more prone to derogatory comments and sexualized photoshopped images, are put in place through policy updates.
To develop these guidelines, which include banning “severe sexualizing content” and “attacks through negative descriptions” from comments, Meta spoke to public figures like actresses and journalists for insight.
“We always use stakeholder engagement whenever we change our policy; we reach out to organizations and individuals all over the world. And we ask them to give us their very explicit and honest input,” says Southworth.
Meta says new community guidelines and policies are just one step of their planned advancements toward helping eradicate online gender-based violence.
Banner photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash
