Meta announced Instagram and Facebook are founding members of Take It Down — a new platform by National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help prevent young people’s intimate images from being posted online in the future.
“Having a personal intimate image shared with others can be scary and overwhelming, especially for young people. It can feel even worse when someone tries to use those images as a threat for additional images, sexual contact or money — a crime known as sextortion,” the tech giant said in its blog.
Take It Down lets young people take back control of their intimate images. People can go to TakeItDown.NCMEC.org and follow the instructions to submit a case that will proactively search for their intimate images on participating apps. Take It Down assigns a unique hash value — a numerical code — to their image or video privately and directly from their own device. Once they submit the hash to NCMEC, companies like ours can use those hashes to find any copies of the image, take them down and prevent the content from being posted on our apps in the future.
Built in a way that respects young peoples’ privacy and data security, Take It Down allows people to only submit a hash — rather than the intimate image or video itself — to NCMEC. Hashing turns images or videos into a coded form that can no longer be viewed, producing hashes that are secure digital fingerprints.
With the launch of Take It Down, people of all ages can stop the spread of their intimate images online, including:
- Young people under 18 years old worried their content has been or will be posted online
- Parents or trusted adults on behalf of a young person
- Adults who are worried about images taken of them when they were under 18.
Take It Down was designed with Meta’s financial support. We are working with NCMEC to promote Take It Down across our platforms, in addition to integrating it into Facebook and Instagram so people can easily access it when reporting potentially violating content. Take It Down builds off of the success of platforms like StopNCII, a platform we launched in 2021 with South West Grid for Learning (SWGfL) and more than 70 NGO’s worldwide, which helps adults stop the spread of their intimate images online.
