In his eighth appearance before the US Congress, Mark Zuckerberg — CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — finally said sorry. Turning to the gallery filled with parents of children who had faced abuse on and through social media — some even committed suicide — Zuckerberg said: “No-one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered.” An apology is never wasted. In this case, though, it is far from enough. Earlier this week, the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and Discord appeared before a bipartisan committee of the US Senate to answer for how these platforms are used by predators against children. The issue, however, does not concern the US alone but parents, policy-makers and society, including and especially in India.
Two companion Amnesty International reports published in 2023 highlighted “the abuses experienced by children and young people using TikTok, and how these abuses are caused by TikTok’s recommender system and the underlying business model”. Time and again, studies, reports and leaked documents have shown that social media platforms, reliant as they are on “engagement” and “attention”, have not done enough to address the harms caused by their amoral algorithms.
India has over 600 million smartphone users, and teenagers are among the fastest-growing segments within this category. These figures, along with data from the
National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), present a chilling picture of the potential scale of minor abuse. According to the NCRB, about 28 per cent of the entire minor population has faced some form of sexual abuse, but many victims do not come forward to register a complaint. Despite this, in 2022 alone, 38,911 child rape and nearly 3,500 cases of sexual exploitation online were reported. Given these figures, it would be naïve at best and negligent at worst for social media platforms not to hold themselves to account.
India, despite being the largest market for Meta, has fewer content moderators — both proportionally and in absolute numbers — than the US or Europe. This must be addressed. It is also important to have mass awareness and education campaigns on safe and responsible smartphone use for parents and children, in schools and beyond, especially in non-metro towns and villages. Law enforcement too needs the requisite resources and training to deal with crimes online — even as the police finds its feet on social media misuse, AI-created deepfakes are becoming increasingly common. The Big Tech bosses in Silicon Valley have often used the excuse that their products are “platforms, not publishers” to escape accountability for their misuse. That argument is increasingly wearing thin.
