Dear Signers,

Join us in putting up a good fight. For every woman, every girl, everywhere! PRESS HERE

"In the last few weeks, we’ve seen disturbing instances of bullying and harassment on Instagram in India, especially towards women who are creators and public figures. As these events occurred, we’ve also seen communities on Instagram mobilize to demand justice, express solidarity towards those who are being targeted and ask for sterner action against the perpetrators. It’s our responsibility to create a safe environment. In this regard, we want to outline our future course of action and also highlight our existing policies and safety measures.

Today, we are announcing stricter action on abusive behaviour. We have always removed rape threats from Facebook and Instagram and responded to requests from law enforcement agencies, but starting today we will also disable profiles and accounts that make severe rape threats when we are made aware of them. Threats of rape endanger women’s physical safety and mental well-being and have no place on our apps.

We also understand that when people receive multiple abusive comments and DMs in the way that public figures and creators do, especially women, the triggering effect can be worse than the individual attacks. This month, we introduced new controls for creators to manage who can message or add them to groups in Instagram Direct. In the coming weeks, we will also launch stricter penalties for people who violate our policies: those that violate our Instagram Community Guidelines will be temporarily blocked from being able to send messages, make calls, or react to messages in Direct. We will continue to invest in tackling this problem and innovate to ensure a safe community.

Additionally, we have comment moderation tools and interventions like comment warnings that use AI to detect bullying language before it’s posted. We know it can feel overwhelming to manage a rush of negativity, so people can now delete comments in bulk, pin positive comments to the top of their posts, and block or restrict accounts that post negative comments. In May 2020, we launched ‘Lock your Profile’ on Facebook in India - the first country where we launched this - that allows you to lock your profile so that non-friends can’t view your photos and posts on your timeline, and activates multiple privacy settings - new and existing - with just one click.

We take enforcement seriously, and on Instagram, in Q1 of 2020 alone we took action on 1.5 million pieces of content for bullying and harassment and we found 95% of violent and graphic content that we removed before it was reported to us. You can read more in our Community Standards Enforcement Report. These are our key ongoing efforts to give our users control over their interactions and the actions we’ve taken to keep them safe. But we understand there’s more to do.
Hate speech and threats of violence against women are unacceptable, and we will do a better job showing up for the women on our platform.

You’ll hear more from us in the coming months." -  Ankhi Das, Director, Public Policy, India, South and Central Asia - Facebook