Meta, owned by Facebook on Thursday, announces a slew of steps to protect woman users on its platform. It takes several initiatives aimed towards the online safety of women. It also includes a project to prevent the spread of non-consensual intimate images

Meta announces three initiatives to Protect Women

Meta announces three initiatives to help protect women in India. These include a new platform to check and limit the sharing of non-consensual intimate images (NCII). It will be available in Hindi and 11 other Indian languages. Meta has also appointed Indian members to its Global Women’s Safety Expert Advisors.

StopNCII.org is an initiative by Meta to prevent the spread of non-consensual intimate images (NCII), call as “revenge porn”. In partnership with UK Revenge Porn Helpline, StopNCII.org builds on Meta’s NCII Pilot. It is an emergency program that allows potential victims to proactively hash their intimate images

The platform is in partnership with organizations such as Social Media Matters, the Centre for Social Research, and Red Dot Foundation.

The platform will let women, who are victims, submit their cases to the platform. It will work with companies such as Facebook, Linkedin, Bumble, Discord, and others to ensure that such images get remove. Women can create their cases on the platform and keep a track of the status as well.

This tool will generate a hash from someone’s intimate images where a unique hash value is added to an image. Duplicate copies of the image all have the exact same hash value. StopNCII.org then shares the hash with participating companies so they can help detect and remove the images from being shared online.

Meta has also launched the Women’s Safety Hub. It includes specific resources for women leaders, journalists, and survivors of abuse. Additionally, it also contains video-on-demand safety training and allows visitors to register for live safety training. It will now be available in 12 languages such as Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, Bengali, Odia, Assamese, Kannada, and Malayalam.

Meta Appointed big members as a part of Global Women’s Safety Expert Advisors

Meta has also appointed Bishakha Datta, who is Executive Editor at Point of View, and Jyoti Vadehra, Head of Media & Communications at the Centre. They are the first Indian member to its Global Women’s Safety Expert Advisors. The group comprises 12 other non-profit leaders, activists, and academic experts from different parts of the world and consults Meta in the development of new policies.

Meta also launched a discussion paper by Sattva Consulting titled, ‘Connect, Collaborate and Create: Women and Social Media During the Pandemic’. The Meta-commissioned paper talks about measures to address the sharp gender imbalance in social media usage in India.

The paper highlights that only 33 percent of women in India use social media, against 67 percent of men. The paper suggests ways to bridge the gender divide due to issues such as limited internet connectivity in rural areas, lack of device ownership, and poor digital literacy.

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