New Meta-Backed Platform Designed to Stop Online Sextortion
The new platform is meant to stop nonconsensual pornography from spreading online.
James Martin/CNET
Meta announced Monday that Facebook and Instagram are founding members of a new platform called Take It Down. The platform is meant to make it easier to stop nonconsensual pornography, also known as revenge porn, a practice in which a person uses?someone else’s explicit image without that individual’s consent to publicly embarrass them or to extort them for more images or money.?
Take It Down, which is run by the?National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, allows people of all ages to use their phones to anonymously attach a numerical hash, or digital fingerprint, to intimate images or videos. Files with the hash attached to them are no longer viewable on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.
“This all happens without the image or video ever leaving your device or anyone viewing it,” Take It Down wrote on its website. “Only the hash value will be provided to NCMEC.”
In 2017, Facebook launched a similar project in Australia. It worked with a small government agency headed by e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant.
“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” Inman Grant said at the time, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
According to a study in the?American Psychological Association, about one in 12 US adults have been victims of nonconsensual pornography. The study found that women are more often the targets of nonconsensual pornography, and men the perpetrators.
Women who were targets of nonconsensual pornography also reported having lower psychological well-being and higher physical symptoms compared to nontargets, according to the APA’s study.?
For more, read how sharing deepfake revenge porn is illegal?in Virginia and how Reddit banned deepfake revenge porn.