#KEEPKIDSSAFEONLINE

U.S. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL), Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, delivered an opening statement at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled “Protecting Our Children Online.” The hearing examined the challenge of ensuring online child safety and privacy, with witnesses testifying to the risks, threats, and harms that children face in the online world.

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Facebook made nearly 21 million reports of
child sexual materials last year, and it has been estimated that 75% of these will become invisible once it
applies to end-to-end encryption.
Those reports are not just 'reports' — they are children.

Survivor Sarah Cooper at the 2021 Facebook Annual Shareholders Meeting

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Help Dr. Lisette Cooper
Keep Kids Safe Online!

Sept. 6, 2022 ECPAT Freedom Award Honoree

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I support the survivor-centered Brave movement to end childhood sexual violence and it's campaign #BeBraveZuck to create an internet where children are free from all forms of digital sexual violence.

Lisette Cooper, Vice Chair Fiduciary Trust International

ABOUT

Over the past few years, a coalition of women from the Women's Inclusion Project has been working with other women investors and with a coalition of other investment firms, as well as ICCR and with Christian Brothers Investment Services, on a number of shareholder engagements. Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) online has been growing at an explosive rate. This is an important issue, and we want to raise investor awareness. As shareholders in Facebook, we are concerned about regulatory risk, in particular. This is how #KeepKidsSafeOnline was born.

The key ask in our resolution is for a board-level report assessing the risk of increased sexual exploitation of children as the Company develops and offers additional privacy tools, such as end-to-end encryption. Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that end-to-end encryption will make it harder for Facebook to identify child abuse on the platform. It turns out we were prescient on filing our resolution, as there has been a recent related bipartisan bill in the Senate, the Earn-It Act, which puts pressure on tech companies relative to their exemption from liability for third-party content on their sites related to child abuse. There is likely to be further pressure on revenue and government regulation associated with this issue area.

Reports of child sexual exploitation in 2020 rose 28% from 2019 levels. Last year, there were a total of 21.7 million reports, involving more than 65.4 million images, videos and other files containing suspected child sexual abuse material...

Michael Passoff of Proxy Impact (2021)

on the problem of child abuse and exploitation problem at Facebook

We are proud of our friend and ally Cathy Rowan, who was a panelist on the UN High Level Political Forum 2020 Virtual Event: Stop Child Abuse in Social Media!

"The yearly event, known as the High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, held this year from July 7 to July 16, provides a venue for U.N. member countries to highlight local progress as well as an opportunity for advocates to address concerns".

— Global Sisters Report

WHO WE ARE

#KeepKidsSafeOnline is a project of the Women’s Inclusion Project (WIP). WIP utilizes gender lens investment strategies to support women and girls. Our partner Proxy Impact provides shareholder advocacy and proxy voting services for impact investors. Together we engage companies to increase board gender diversity, expand the number of women in senior management, eliminate gender pay disparities, and stop online child sexual exploitation.

If you would like to be an ally, please see the contact information below.

One Third of Internet users are children and 800 million kids now are on social media.

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Our Children

Facebook's planned encryption, warning that it will cloak the actions of child predators and make children more vulnerable to sexual abuse. By moving to end-to-end encryption without first taking steps to stop child sexual abuse on its platforms, Facebook will effectively make invisible 70 percent of CSAM cases – an estimated 12 million instances – that are currently being detected and reported.

Proxy Impact Press Release, June 9, 2020