Take It Down is Meta’s plan to stop the distribution of private teenage photos

Meta announced Monday that Facebook and Instagram are helping to launch Take It Down, a new platform aimed at preventing explicit images of minors from being circulated online.

According to a press release, Meta and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) have partnered to develop a program that will proactively look for private images using a unique hash code.

The program allows minors to tag pictures of themselves that are shared online against their will and give anyone a unique digital code that can help tag the picture and remove it from the internet.

“Take It Down privately and directly from your own device assigns your image or video a unique hash value — a numeric code,” the press release reads. “Once they submit the hash to NCMEC, companies like ours can use those hashes to find copies of the image, remove them, and prevent the content from being published on our apps in the future.”

According to Meta, the program is built to “respect young people’s privacy and data security” by allowing users to send only the hash code assigned to their image — and not the image itself — to NCMEC.

According to NCMEC, the hash code is generated on users’ phones, which prevents the image from being uploaded to a central NCMEC database.

Once users submit their hash code, companies can use these unique codes to find, remove, and prevent those images from being shared on their platforms.

The company said it is integrating the platform with Facebook and Instagram so users can easily access the program when reporting potentially infringing content in their apps.

Take It Down builds on Meta’s previous Stop NCII software, which operates on a similar concept for adults. This program was launched in 2021 with more than 70 non-profit organizations to curb “revenge porn” online.

The company did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Dot.

We crawl the web so you don’t have to.

Sign up for the Daily Dot newsletter to get the best and worst of the web delivered to your inbox every day.