Facebook introduces new tools, measures to prevent child exploitation

Facebook has decided to introduce reforming measures that will prevent content that exploits children on its platform. The social media giant is aiming to develop target solutions, including new tools and policies that will reduce the sharing of child exploitation content. 

These new measures will include a pop-up alert for terms on Facebook-owned apps associated with child exploitation, while another measure states, that it will attract legal consequences for those individuals or groups for sharing harmful content in the form of videos and memes. 

Facebook Global Head of Safety chief Antigone Davis said that the company has also been working closely with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to understand the content related to minors that people share and consume, to form relevant guidelines and rules.

"We found that more than 90% of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content. And copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half of the child-exploitative content we reported in that time period," said Davis in a blog post.

Preventing Child Exploitation on Our Apps https://t.co/qNqKMPaXid

— Facebook Newsroom (@fbnewsroom) February 23, 2021

The blog post also highlights that the platform is soon going to improve detection capabilities.

"We’ve updated our child safety policies to clarify that we will remove Facebook profiles, Pages, groups, and Instagram accounts that are dedicated to sharing otherwise innocent images of children with captions, hashtags or comments containing inappropriate signs of affection or commentary about the children depicted in the image,' added Davis.

Facebook has also emphasized updating reporting tools. "We’ve made it easier to report content for violating our child exploitation policies. To do this, we added the option to choose “involves a child” under the “Nudity & Sexual Activity” category of reporting in more places on Facebook and Instagram," read the blog post.