Meta, Snap, and TikTok have established a new program called Thrive to help prevent the spread of graphic content that depicts or encourages self-harm and suicide. Thrive allows participating companies to share “signals” to alert each other to infringing content on their platforms.
Thrive was set up in conjunction with the Mental Health Coalition, a charitable organization that says it works to remove the stigma around mental health discussions. Meta says it provides the technical infrastructure behind Thrive that allows “signals to be shared securely.” It uses the same cross-platform signal sharing tech used in the Lantern program, designed to help combat child abuse online. Participating companies can share hashes corresponding to infringing media to signal it to each other.
Meta says it has made it harder to find such content on its platform but tries to leave room for people to discuss their stories of mental health, suicide and self-harm, as long as they don’t promotes or provides graphic descriptions.
According to Meta charts, the company handles millions of pieces of suicide and self-harm content every quarter. Last quarter, it restored an estimated 25,000 of those posts, most of them after a user appealed.
