In a recent appearance before the US Congress, Mark Zuckerberg - CEO of Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - apologised to parents of children who were victims of cyber bullying and sexual exploitation on his social media platforms, which led many children to commit suicide. Turning to the gallery filled with grief-stricken parents, some of whom were holding the photographs of their dead children, Zuckerberg said: "I'm sorry for everything you have all been thorough. No-one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered."
The bipartisan committee of the US Senate grilled the CEOs of Meta, TikTok, Snapchat and X (formerly Twitter) regarding how their platforms are being abused by predators and what they were doing about it. The issue, however, does not concern the US alone, but parents and governments of all countries, including Bangladesh as social media abuse and its harmful impacts, especially on women and children, are growing ominously.
According to a report in The Guardian, a court in the American state of New Mexico has already launched legal action against Meta for child trafficking on its platforms. Internal documents obtained by the court suggests as many as one lakh minors - the majority of them female - face some form of harassment on Facebook and Instagram daily, which prompted the attorney general of the court to term the social media company as the "largest marketplace for predators and paedophiles globally".
Bangladesh, with 59.2 million users as of June 2023, is among top three countries contributing to the active user growth of Facebook, according to Meta. Facebook, Snapchat, and TikTok are most popular among the teenagers. While social media sites have evolved into a great source of communication, entertainment, and fun, they are also considered responsible for the spread of crimes like sextortion, previously unknown here.
Sexual predators or 'sextortionists', for example, are exploiting women and children online by threatening to make public secretly filmed sexually explicit images or fake images created through 'deepfake' apps if they don't provide money or sexual favours to them or their clients. The lives of victims are being destroyed, exposing them to risk of depression, social humiliation, and suicide. At least 11 young girls committed suicide in Bangladesh due to online harassment and blackmail over the leaking of private videos on Facebook in the years 2021-2022, according to a study by Action Aid Bangladesh, which also revealed that 63.51 per cent of women in Bangladesh were victims of online harassment.
The trend is becoming increasingly worrisome as social media addiction has assumed an epidemic proportion, which is also responsible for weakening family bonds, attention deficit, sleep deprivation, learning impairment, illicit substance use and much more. Given the alarming rise in social media abuses, it would be negligent by the authorities concerned to not hold social media platforms to account.
Despite being one of the largest markets for Meta, there isn't a Meta office nor local content moderator in Bangladesh, which needs to be addressed. There is also need for raising mass awareness about the safe and responsible use of social media sites for parents and children, in schools and elsewhere. Law enforcement agencies, too, need to increase their resources to deal with the ever-evolving nature of online crimes as AI-generated deepfakes are becoming increasingly common.
Given the gravity of the problem, the governments across the world cannot afford to leave the matter up to the conscience of Big Tech bosses like Mark Zuckerberg in Silicon Valley. So far Zuckerberg has apologised before the US Senate eight times for the harm committed through his platforms. An apology on its own is meaningless when social media sites continue to prioritise profit over users' privacy, physical and mental wellbeing, and do nothing to address the harm caused by their amoral algorithms. To avoid responsibility, top executives of social media sites have been using the excuse that their products are platforms, not publishers. While cyber abuse continues unabated leading to increase in suicide rates, that argument is irresponsible and doesn't hold water.
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