The parent company of Facebook and Instagram, Meta, announces that it is funding a system for tracking intimate images and videos to better remove them from its social networks. A partnership with a US public organization that follows numerous criticisms of Meta’s management responsibility in distributing this content.
is a real ” hidden pandemic according to a vice president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC). In association with this US public organization, the web giant Meta announced on Monday, February 27, the financing of a tool dedicated to combating the non-consensual online sharing of intimate photos and videos of minors.
An illegal practice more commonly known as revenge porn, or sextortion when the victim has to pay to remove this content from the web. According CNNNCMEC has more than 250,000 cases in the United States as of 2016.
Voluntary tracking of your intimate content
baptized” Take it down “, this platform funded 100% by Meta (parent company of Facebook and Instagram) should allow young Americans to make their intimate content automatically identifiable by the platforms on which it would be published.
Specifically, a minor or major user can go to the page dedicated to this tool on the NCMEC website and then decide to link an intimate photo or video to the platform. He or she will then obtain a unique and anonymous hash identifier, the only item to be sent to the US organization’s database.
NCMEC will then share this digital footprint (and only this one) with program partners: Facebook and Instagram, of course, but also Facebook Messenger and Instagram’s direct messaging service. The pornographic platforms OnlyFans and Pornhub are also affected, according to the American television channel CNN.
Therefore, if this same content is uploaded through these services, it will be automatically scanned and then removed if necessary.
A bandage on an open wound
If this tool has the merit of offering users automatic traceability of their content on large online platforms for the first time, even Meta’s head of security, Antigone Davies, acknowledges that this tool is not a panacea with CNN.
Take It Down can identify a specific photo even if it’s copied or a color filter is applied to it, but the platform crashes if the image is otherwise altered. It is even enough to reconsider the intimate content, says the American media. But the Meta leader believes it is a tool that is part of a broader approach to combat the misappropriation of intimate images of young people.
However, the multinational does not act out of the goodness of its heart: Facebook and Instagram have been in the crosshairs of the US government since the leak of an internal report in 2021, recognizing the effect ” toxic of Instagram with young teenagers. Since then, Meta has embarked on various initiatives to protect its users, as recalled by his press release. However, as pointed out CNNseveral experts claim that this is not enough to catch up.
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