Many people, and much more among young people and adolescents, share -sometimes under duress- content of a sexual nature that ends up filtering on social networks and the web. take it down is the tool that aims to give people back control over their privacy to block such unauthorized content. It is financed by Goal Platforms -owner of instagram and Facebook – and managed by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC).
To use take it down, the user, anonymously, can generate a fingerprint of the image. This fingerprint consists of a unique set of numbers that assigns the image a hash value: that is, a kind of algorithm that operates in a chain. This makes it possible to identify the exact copy of that image or video on the Internet. Various company platforms are involved in the Take It Down initiative, and companies that detect an image or video that matches that code can take steps to limit its dissemination and remove it.
Some of the pages involved in take it down are Facebook and instagram of Goal and Yubo, OnlyFans and pornhubpages that are owned by mindgeek. If the image is on a site other than those, or if it is sent encrypted by WhatsAppunfortunately it cannot be withdrawn. for now, Twitter and TikTok are not part of take it downbut from the tool they bet that more and more companies get involved to find a solution to this problem.
It must be taken into account that in the event that someone alters the original image by cropping it, adding an emoji or turning it into a meme, among other possibilities, it requires a new hash to convert into a new image. Those visually similar will have similar footprints, with a difference of only one character. The site works with both real images and images generated by artificial intelligence and deepfakes.
“take it down It’s specifically meant for people who have an image that they think is already somewhere on the web, or could be,” says Gavin Portnoyspokesperson for NCMEC. In addition, people who have sexted with their partners and whose image is later shared without their consent (or even victims of sextortion), can use this tool to combat child abuse and exploitation.
The appearance of this tool is important if one takes into account that according to statistics on minors, extortion and practices of sextinga 23% of minors between the ages of 12 and 15 receive sexual requests from adults online, according to a study of several Spanish universities carried out on 1,029 adolescents. According to this report, 14% claim to have interacted with adults by sending sexual photos or videos. The sexual request reported by minors was much more common in girls (74.5% of the total) than in boys (25.5%). In addition, NCMEC is seeing an increase in reports of child exploitation online: it received 29.3 million reports in 2021, 35% more than in 2020.
