Listen to Sarah
Watch Brave Movement's Sarah Cooper speaking passionately about her experience and the campaign at April's #BeBrave Global Survivors Action Summit
#BeBraveZuck
We are calling for a child rights and protection driven approach to creating a safe internet. Supported by Proxy Impact, SAGE, and the Brave Movement
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Read how Meta's encryption plan will hide online child sexual exploitation
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Join our social media campaign to ask Mark Zuckerberg to commit to action for children's safety
Background
In 2021, there were over 21.429 million reports of online child sexual abuse material (CSAM), 92% of which came from Meta and its platforms including Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. Meta has announced its plan to apply end-to-end encryption to all its platforms in 2023. Governments, law enforcement agencies, and child protection experts believe that Meta’s encryption plans will make a majority of cases of CSAM invisible. Leaving more children vulnerable while protecting child predators.
#BeBraveZuck Campaign was launched in April 2022, and builds on co-founder Sarah Cooper’s work with Meta shareholders and child safety organizations to hold Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg accountable for their role in facilitating online child sexual abuse. The Brave Movement stands in firm solidarity with Sarah in all of her advocacy and campaigning efforts.
The Brave Movement is calling for a child rights and protection driven approach to creating a safe internet where children and adolescents are safe and secure, free from all forms of digital sexual violence. We call on all technology companies to immediately detect, report, and remove all online childhood sexual violence materials. Online childhood sexual violence is a universal, borderless crime which demands action in every country around the globe.
The Brave Movement envisions a world where there is prevention to protect all children and adolescents–as all children are at immediate and continual risk; healing for survivors, families, and all those affected by childhood sexual violence; and, justice for survivors by holding perpetrators and complicit institutions and families to account.
Suggested Script
Dear Mark,
I join the Brave Movement, Sarah Cooper, and Rhiannon-Faye McDonald in writing to ask you to ensure children’s safety is not put at risk by your current plans to roll out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) on your messaging platforms.
It is time to stop presenting this as a binary choice between children’s safety and user privacy and work constructively together at ways to protect both.
Let me be clear, I fully support user privacy. I am also not opposed to E2EE in principle as long as there are safeguards which mean it does not harm children and put them at risk.
Our coalition wants to celebrate the vital work social media companies like yours do to tackle child sex abuse. Meta is a leader when it comes to reporting suspected child sex abuse online, with Facebook alone accounting for 94% of all reports. In 2021, reports from platforms safeguarded over 8,000 children in the UK alone. This deserves huge recognition.
It is why many of those who work in child protection are so concerned about the potential impact of your planned changes. There are estimates that:
If E2EE is rolled out without the right safeguards, 14 million reports of child sex abuse online could be lost. This would be like blindfolding yourself to the abuse on your platforms.
While we welcome your decision to delay the roll-out of E2EE until you have the right technology, we are seeking reassurances on what these safeguards will look like. There is a worrying trend towards victim blaming, which includes measures you announced to educate children to resist “unwanted attention”. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how the majority of child sex abuse happens. Abusers use sophisticated techniques to manipulate, groom and blackmail children. Many victims do not view themselves as victims.
That is why I am asking you to make a commitment that you will only roll out E2EE on your platforms when you have safeguards to ensure this will not make it easier for child sex abusers to:
- Groom children
- Make, share or view sexual images of children
- Avoid detection by law enforcement
Please don’t turn the lights out on your ability to detect child sex abuse. Your company employs some of the world’s brightest minds and we hope that you will harness that expertise to prioritise finding a solution that protects privacy while not putting children in danger.
Yours sincerely,
[YOUR NAME]
Take action on social media
Millions of children are already online 🧑💻 It’s up to us to keep them safe. That’s why @BeBraveGlobal are calling on @Meta to step up and protect children from sexual violence online.
🔎 Content monitoring ✅ Age verification 🤝 Cooperation with law enforcement 3 steps to create a safer internet for children everywhere.
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