Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, took action in 2023 on more than 1000 million pieces of content that endangered children, including nudity, physical abuse and sexual exploitation.
According to Meta’s India monthly report, action was taken against 1,21,80,300 crore such content between January 2023 and December 2023 under the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 action.
“We measure the volume of content (such as posts, photos, videos or comments) and take action against violations of our standards,” the company said. “This metric shows the scale of our enforcement activity. Actions taken may include actions taken from Facebook or Remove a piece of content on Instagram or overlay a photo or video that may be disturbing to some viewers with a warning.”
From January 1 to December 31, Facebook data shows that a total of 4,681,300 pieces of content related to “Child Endangerment – Nudity and Physical Abuse” and “Child Endangerment – Sexual Exploitation” faced action.
Meanwhile, Instagram’s numbers are even higher, with 74,99,000 pieces of content facing litigation during the same period, a large portion of which were related to sexual exploitation, with 4 million pieces of content in January last year alone.
Meta said: “In July 2018, we updated our approach to clarify how many discrete pieces of content we take action against that violate our policies, and we will continue to mature and improve our approach as we work to provide the most accurate and up-to-date content. Meaningful metrics. Overall, our intent is to accurately reflect the total number of content items we have taken action for policy violations.”
However, it is worth noting that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently attended a U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with executives from Twitter (now renamed X) and TikTok. The phenomenon comes as U.S. lawmakers and parents are increasingly concerned about the impact of social media on young people’s lives.
As far as India is concerned, the central government has made its position clear with the goal of ensuring that the Internet in India is open, secure and trustworthy, and accountable to all digital Nagaris.
Rule 4(2) of the Information Technology Rules, 2021 requires major social media platforms to assist law enforcement agencies in identifying the source of information related to various sensitive matters, including national security, foreign relations, public order, and criminal content such as rape and pornography or child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said in a parliamentary response: “The Information Technology Rules, 2021 provide specific laws for intermediaries including social media intermediaries and platforms obligations to ensure that they are responsible for a safe and trustworthy Internet, including promptly providing information and taking action to remove prohibited information that is obscene, pornographic, paedophilic, intrusive on the privacy (including physical privacy) of others, including any misinformation, manifestly false information and Deepfakes.”
“If intermediaries fail to comply with their legal obligations under the IT Rules, 2021, they will lose the safe harbor protection under Section 79 of the IT Act and shall be liable for consequential action or prosecution under any legal provisions. Those currently in force include the Information Technology Act and Indian Penal Code such as Sections 292 and 293 of IPC,” he added.
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