New global service for getting nudes off the Internet

Finally there’s hope – more than hope, actually – for young people who need to get nudes taken down from the Internet. They can go to the just-launched site TakeItDown.org, run by NCMEC (the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children) and funded by Meta.

It’s a free service young people anywhere in the world can use anonymously to get help in deleting nude, partially nude, or sexually explicit images or videos taken of them. They don’t even need to post or send any examples to TakeItDown. Most young people are too embarrassed or afraid to ask even adults they trust to help them through the ordeal of having intimate images go public, which is why anonymous help is so needed. The process works without any “image or video ever leaving your device or anyone viewing it,” NCMEC explains. Even if they’re just worried an image or video might be shared online, but it hasn’t been yet, they can report it at TakeItDown without it ever leaving their phone.

Even adults can use the service if the images were taken and posted online before they were 18. If not, they can use the adult version – StopNCII.org – which was created in the UK in 2015 and which Meta has been piloting in India for over a year. “NCII” stands for “nonconsensual intimate images,” the more accurate term than what is often called “revenge porn.” Read more about this human and civil rights abuse and hard work that has been done in the US against it at the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative’s site, which says 1 in 8 adult social media users have been targets of nonconsensual sharing of their intimate images.

Images can’t be removed from everywhere online yet. The sites where they appear have to cooperate with NCMEC, but the current partners – Facebook, Instagram, Yubo, OnlyFans and Pornhub – are important because they’re well-known and get a lot of traffic, and the last two are, obviously, extra important to have participating. Here’s coverage at The Verge and the Wall Street Journal.