Facebook South Asia Safety Summit 2019

As a Trusted Partner of Facebook Corporation, Hithawathi got the opportunity to participate ‘Facebook South Asia Safety Summit 2019’ held in New Delhi on the 19th November 2019 representing Sri Lanka. Stakeholders from India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Afghanistan too joined the Summit, which was organized for the 2nd time.

The Summit took all the efforts to discuss of how to keep the society secure when they face issues with the trendy use of Facebook and Instagram in South Asian countries. The Ministress for Women & Child Development (India) launched ‘We Think Digital’, which includes learning modules related to online safety. It was quite pathetic to get to know that domestic violence in South Asian countries is supported and justified by 50% of the society.

There were few presentations and panel discussions with regard to various topics such as a description of Facebook about their partnerships, policies, tools, resources and feedback, an open-source photo video matching technology to prevent kids’ abusive images being published in future, ‘Child Safety Hackathon’, non-consensually shared intimate images (to threaten / revenge), ‘Let’s Talk’ suicide prevention mental health foundation, Human trafficking, new tools of Instagram (managing time, privacy settings, interactions in comment filters, restriction instead of blocking, comment warnings – currently in USA only, hiding likes and reporting), ‘Aarambh India’, safeguarding children against sexual offences, reporting of hate speech and nudity, ‘Counter Speech Fellowship’ (CSF), The Queer Muslim Project and creating equality / digital literacy of women including the disabled. Therein Cybercrime laws in Sri Lanka were questioned too.

The Summit paved the way for Hithawathi to meet up a lot of resource persons from a number of international organizations that work for the goals of somewhat similar.