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Social media giants Meta, TikTok, and Snap are among the founding members of a new platform called Thrive that looks to prevent the spread of online content related to suicide and self-harm.
Thrive, launched by a nonprofit called the Mental Health Coalition (MHC) on Thursday, September 12, will make it easier for online platforms to take action against such potentially harmful materials by enabling them to share certain content “signals” with each other.
These content signals are known as hashes, which are essentially a string of characters for uniquely identifying a particular file. On Thrive, platforms will be able to share hashes of the content that has been classified as depicting or encouraging suicide and self-harm through viral social media challenges, etc.
The hashes will only tie to content and won’t include identifiable information about accounts or individuals, the MHC clarified. Thrive’s technical infrastructure was provided by Meta and is the same one used to power the Tech Coalition’s Lantern child safety programme launched in November last year.
With Thrive, social media platforms will be able to collate and share information on self-harm content with each other. For instance, Snapchat will receive an alert about a piece of content that has been flagged by others as encouraging self-harm. Based on this alert, the company will be able to assess and take action against the flagged content.
Similarly, all companies that are part of the Thrive programme will be able to upload, review, and take action against suicide or self-harm content. An annual report on the impact of the suicide prevention-focused platform will also be published with insights from contributing companies.
“We at the MHC are excited to work with Thrive, a unique collaborative of the most influential social media platforms that have come together to address suicide and self-harm content […] Meta, Snap, and TikTok are some of the initial partners to join ‘the exchange’ committing to make an even greater impact and help save lives,” Kenneth Cole, founder of the MHC, said in a statement.
These efforts to tackle online self-harm content come in the backdrop of lawsuits filed against tech giants for contributing to the declining mental health of social media users, especially teenagers. Two years ago, UK authorities held that Meta-owned Instagram was culpable for the suicide of a 14-year-old girl named Molly Russell as she was shown content encouraging self-harm on the platform.
Meanwhile, social media majors such as YouTube and Elon Musk-owned X are yet to become members of Thrive.
