On board to help, besides Facebook and Instagram, is Yubo, a social networking app that took off during the pandemic thanks to quarantined teenagers.
There are also two unexpected participants that come from the online XXX world -- OnlyFans, a service thought to be used primarily by sex workers who produce pornography, and the pornography website Pornhub.
Social media's back against the wall
After mounting public pressure and parental outrage, Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram have all taken action lately to help reduce sextortion and pornography and provide more parental controls.
But Twitter? Nope. According to its policy, anyone on Twitter “can share graphic content and consensually produced adult nudity and sexual behavior content within your tweets, provided that you mark this media as sensitive.”
That’s playing with fire, contends Yaron Litwin, chief marketing officer at Canopy, a platform designed to keep kids safe online and give parents some solace. He told ConsumerAffairs that this type of content is not always marketed accordingly, potentially exposing children to inappropriate content.
“On most social media apps, children are not supposed to have an account or use platforms without parental supervision until they turn 13 – but enforcing these guidelines while maintaining user privacy has presented a major issue for tech companies,” he said.
How Take It Down works
The service isn’t a single-click button you can push and instantly have sexual images of minors taken off the internet. But the center says it’s at least one step and that one step in the right direction is better than none.
When ConsumerAffairs did a walk-thru of Take It Down, it was pretty simple. The only organizational thing you have to do is find any images and videos that include nude, partially nude or sexually explicit content.
The steps work like this:
First, you need to verify that the images include nudity and if they were shared online.
A person whose sexually-explicit image is on the internet selects the image or video that they want removed from their device and clicks on “Get Started“. Images and videos remain on the person’s device and are not uploaded.
For each image or video, Take It Down will then generate a “hash” – a digital fingerprint – that can be used to identify an exact copy of that image or video. NCMEC adds the hash to a secure list it maintains and will only share it with participating online platforms that have agreed to use that list to scan their public or unencrypted sites and apps for the hashes of a person’s explicit content.
If an online platform detects an image or video on its public or unencrypted service that matches a hash value, that’s where it can take action to limit the spread of the explicit content.
Parents still need to clean up their side of the street
Until the day when all of those images are gone and never to be found again online, Litwin echoed the public safety alert the FBI recently sent out regarding sextortion.
“The best protection against online threats like this for kids and teens is honest and open parental communication. Parents should talk with their children and provide examples of online communication and behavior that could be a concern,” he suggested.
“In addition, having clear family rules in place regarding online responsibility and the sharing of personal photos is crucial.”
Naturally, he said that Canopy is a solution – primarily because of its anti-sexting feature that alerts a parent when an explicit image is sent or received – but added it’s not the only one out there that can help parents manage and monitor their child’s online behavior.
“There are many incredible tools parents can employ to help them facilitate these conversations and implement safe internet practices at home,” he said.