This is part of a new initiative taken by Facebook and some civil society organizations. The initiative encourages people to report and not share such content anymore so it doesn’t harm children further. To understand how and why people share child exploitative content on Facebook, the Facebook company conducted a deep analysis of the illegal child exploitative content this year that the company reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) in 2020 october and november, It was found that more than 90% of this content was the same as the previously reported content. A further deep check shows that most of this sharing was happening without any intent to harm children. These led the foundation to set a new initiative with civil society organizations. That is ‘Report it, don’t share it’, as these organizations are experts in the field of online child safety.
The initiative is being endorsed by the actor Neha Dhupia, who runs a community named ‘Freedom to Feed’ on Instagram which gives the women a space to speak about breastfeeding and have an open talk about the challenges around it. But the community has changed into a space for discussing diverse aspects of parenting too. Neha says that “I’ve seen this happen and it’s not right. We share the content that comes to us without thinking the consequences even it is a content of child abuse,may be doing it with a good intention to make people more aware of the negative events around us, but the impact of such content on the child who is subjected to that content is heavy. So today in partnership with Facebook I want to spread awareness among people that when you see such content, please DON’T SHARE rather REPORT IT”
The initiative launches today with an animated video which visually communicates the negative impact of child abuse content could have on the child who is the subject to that content even if it is about condemning the act. Madhu Sirohi Head of Policy Programs and Outreach of Facebook says that, “We want to have a safe and supportive environment on Facebook and we are working for that. We will invest heavily in people and technology to identify and remove such kind of content before people view it, we also want to spread awareness among people in the correct behaviour in case people spot such child abuse content on our platform. We are thankful to our partnership with Neha Dhupia and civil society organizations for making this initiative possible.”
Facebook updated its child safety policies to clarify that it will remove Facebook profiles, pages, groups and accounts that are sharing such content. The company also added the option to choose “involves a child” under the “Nudity & Sexual Activity” category on Facebook to make it easier to report the content for violating its policies.
