Centre for Social Research attended the Facebook South Asia Summit held in New Delhi on 29th October 2018 in partnership with Ministry of Women and Child Development, Govt. of India. The summit brought together partners who are working for online safety and empowering the users with tools like counter speech and reporting of inappropriate content on social media.

Our flagship initiative on online safety – Social Surfing, is being run with the support of Facebook since 2015 and has reached out to 33000+ Millenials in 117 cities in the last three years. Amitabh Kumar, head of Media and Communications at CSR India also presented the programme to the delegates in Pecha Kucha format. The slides covered our journey from day one when we started gathering resources for an interactive workshop with millenials on online safety. It was interesting to see many stakeholders come forward to seek more information on this initiative post the presentation.

Dr Ranjana Kumari, Director, Centre for Social Research was on a panel discussing – Technology for Women. She shared the stage with other delegates – Ms Rekha Sharma, NCW; Ms Priyanka Dutt, BBC Media Action; and Ms Lima Madomi, Tech Women Afghanistan. During her session she emphasized on the voices of women like #MeToo that are escalated by social media platforms. She also mentioned that the impact should now percolate down to empowering the women in taking up the challenge to call out the perpetrators inflicting violence on them.

It was great to connect with other partners and discuss ways of working together for online safety of users.