The Child Exploitation and Protection Centre (CEOP) and Facebook announced an initiative that gives Facebook users direct access to CEOP’s advice and reporting centre from their Facebook homepage.
The initiative is not based on a standard panic button solution but on a CEOP Facebook App and a CEOP Facebook page. This means that only users who install the app will have direct access to CEOP.
I have met CEOP CEO Jim Gamble during the course of meetings between CEOP and the ISPA and understand the hugely difficult nature of their job. CEOP volunteer staff have to spend much of their time looking at horrendous photographic evidence of child abuse. It isn’t something that a person can do for too long due to the mental stresses involved.
The success of the whole Facebook initiative depends on whether or not the CEOP app becomes viral. To facilitate the distribution of the app, Facebook has agreed to support the initiative via an advertising campaign.
CEOP deserves your support.
One reply on “Facebook and CEOP collaborate on child protection”
If there is one area of the industry I work in where I’ve found it hardest to wrangle my personal views with those of the ISP’s I’ve worked for it’s around this issue.
Today I have no doubt whatsoever that we have an obligation to protect where possible the vulnerable, especially kids who are targetted easilly by sexual deviants and predators. For years I was a vociferous supporter of freedom of speech, rights of the individual and all that rubbish but at the end of the day what price a small bit of restriction if it stops one child from being abused. I don’t buy the counter arguments that it only starts with just one small restriction before we are in a nanny state. We are in one today whether we like it or not but yet kids are still being abused like it was going out of fashion.
The sad thing is its those who host the content and can freely move it within hours from one location (in many cases countries) to another that riles me and we have to do so much more as an industry working with people like Ceop and others to find a solution to this situation. Panic buttons may or may not work but if it stops one child from being taken away and abused then it’s worth it.