Facebook to use tech to make the platform safe and a more welcoming place for women
Facebook is creating better guidelines and is using machine learning and AI to fight abuse and harassment women face online.
Facebook has said that it is developing policies and technology to make the social media platform “safer, more welcoming for women”.
The Facebook Newsroom blog post published on October 29 details the various measures the company has taken and how collaborations with experts have helped create these policies.
“At Facebook, we believe that women should have equal access to all of the economic opportunity, education and social connection the internet provides,'' reads the post.
Cindy Southworth, a member of Facebook Safety Advisory Board says, “We take a comprehensive approach to making our platform a safer place for women, including writing clear policies, engaging with experts and developing cutting-edge technology to help prevent abuse from happening in the first place.”
The guidelines for Facebook and Instagram outline rules for harassment and abuse like sharing of non-consensual intimate imagery, rules against harassment, like sending multiple unwanted messages to a person who’s made it clear that they don’t want to receive them.
Facebook says that these policies are created in collaboration with global experts who help in understanding how abuse and harassment manifest differently in different places. After consulting with experts and women users in India, Facebook understood that some women choose not to share profile pictures that include their faces. This concern was widespread because they were concerned that someone might use the picture to dishonor them or their families. This led Facebook to develop an optional profile picture guard that gives women more control over who can download or share their pictures.
“The general themes when it comes to women’s safety tend to be the same around the world,” says Monika Bickert, Facebook’s Vice President of Global Policy Management. “But we find that when we look at specific countries or regions, the actual types of behavior are very localised.”
Apart from policies, Facebook is developing new technology to aid people to control their experience on the platform.
"In the background, we have tools like AI and machine learning to prevent harassment," Antigone Davis, Facebook's global head of safety, says in a video accompanying the blog post.
"We also are giving user controls -- that means things like blocking, being able to hide and delete comments you don't want underneath your posts, it means being able to report to us."
In case of non-consensual intimate image (NCII) sharing, Facebook uses a combination of digital fingerprinting and photo-matching technology to prevent such images from further circulation. In 2017, they launched a pilot program to help potential victims from blocking their images from being posted on Facebook and Instagram.
Facebook is investing in digital literacy programmes and improved safety resources, and technology that can find violating content proactively — and in some cases, prevent it from being shared in the first place.
(Edited by Rekha Balakrishnan)
