Meta on Wednesday announced its partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for the G20 Stay Safe Online Campaign. The ‘DigitalSuraksha’ campaign aims to create and spread content on staying safe online in multiple Indian languages. It will cover themes like tackling online frauds, reporting harmful content, and keeping oneself safe online.
The first phase of DigitalSuraksha includes partnership with Delhi Police to provide digital literacy to users in Delhi. Meta will work with the Delhi Police on a 2-month long programme to provide digital literacy to 10,000 students across various schools and colleges in Delhi.
Further, Meta and Delhi Police will jointly build resources to educate users about protecting themselves against online scams. As part of this partnership, Meta will also train Delhi police personnel on Meta’s various safety tools.
Meta also announced Digital Nagrik Pledge today, to encourage people across India to become responsible digital citizens. Meta with CBSE will provide Digital Citizenship course to 10 million students and 1 lakh teachers.
Digital Nagrik is the outcome of the Digital Citizenship curriculum introduced for grades 6-8 and developed by CBSE teachers. The programme is managed by 1M1B and supported by Meta.
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A new ‘Help protect children. Don’t Share. Don’t Comment. Report.’ campaign was also launched, to prevent sharing of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and encouraging people to report such content.
‘Tips for tackling misinformation’ was also launched through short videos in Hindi and English.
Sharing the larger context on Safer Internet Day and its partnership with MeitY, Natasha Jog, Head, Public Policy, Instagram and Policy Programs, Facebook India (Meta), in an exclusive interaction with The Hindu explained that Meta invested $16 billion since 2016 on safer internet. More than 15,000 content reviewers are reviewing content in 70 languages, 20 of them are Indian languages.
Is the Digital Suraksha campaign based on urban audiences only, no reference towards women or other vulnerable sections of the society?
Natasha: No, not at all! The partnership with MeitY will put out resources on reporting which is for everybody, all our users, in multiple languages so that it can go across as well.
We’re talking about online frauds and scams, which is again for everybody, it’s not restricted to anyone. The child safety abuse material (CSAM), it keeps children safe.
We are training Delhi Police personnel in safety skills so that they will go on and be the interface and spread it further along the community. And then, CBSE, so it goes to students as well.
What are your expansion plans apart from Delhi to take this initiative ahead?
Natasha: We’ve done in Maharashtra, Assam, Kerala, UP and Delhi is a fifth state we’re going to and so on.
There is this new population that is about to come on 5G network. Do you think that they are more vulnerable?
Natasha: This is why we want to focus on digital literacy, we want to get into CBSE schools and start catching them young because the youngsters who are going to be online. We want to start with that, and our best way is through India’s largest education bowl.
Would you like to go ahead and partner with other State Boards other than CBSE?
Natasha: Of course, it’s one of our goals to partner with State Boards and take this curriculum we just built out. I think we are in second year of the CBSE program. We want to build that out and make sure that we are covering more and more students.
How would you help people in identifying fake news especially when Police personnel or school teachers are themselves sharing fake news, and they are going to be a part of the system?
Natasha: It’s a very legitimate question and it’s one that we grappled with as well. We are putting out videos which talk about misinformation. We are saying how do you spot misinformation? Why should you not believe? Why should you not believe everything that you see online?
Misinformation is a complex and industry-wide problem. We don’t want to be the arbiters of truth; we can’t solve it alone. That’s why we lean on fact-checkers. We’ve got 11 fact checkers, fact-checking in 15 languages.
Big tech companies like Microsoft and Google are doing the same thing, so why can’t you all collaborate and bring something inclusive kind of a platform or initiative? Could we think of something like that in the future?
Natasha: That’s a good point. There is a lot of stuff that we do together. For example, when we are taking on serious issues like CSAM, the industry is connected. In tech terrorism space, industry works really close.
We do, but I think each platform has its own language and has its own audiences who come to the platform for a certain way. There are places where we have our own user base and own target.
