ZEPETO’s mission is to make play powerful through freedom of identity, creative expression, and meaningful connections. Ensuring the safety and well-being of users throughout their experience on our platform is our key priority.

What is ZEPETO?

ZEPETO is a burgeoning avatar-centric social universe where anyone can connect and create beyond the boundaries of the physical world. Since 2018, over 340 million global users have relied on ZEPETO to explore new forms of entertainment, expression, and experience alongside the World’s most popular brands, IP and celebrities. As a community platform powered by millions of creators through ZEPETO Studio, our metaverse is one of the most intuitive, immersive and inclusive virtual spaces that exist today.

Why did your organisation partner with INHOPE?

With a variety of exciting features to exercise your creativity, ZEPETO attracts many young users from all around the globe. Knowing this, it is our responsibility to actively and effectively work to ensure their safety.

While safety tools and features exist in our app to prevent and detect harm, we believe that online child sexual abuse (CSA) is a whole of society problem that demands a whole of society response. This battle requires collective action, and partnering with leading organisations like INHOPE allows us to fortify our efforts, share knowledge, and provide more resources and channels of support to our global community.

What are some of the projects you’re currently working on that might be relevant to those working in online child protection?

This year, we began working in collaboration with Thorn on implementing its Grooming Classifier to our platform to detect conversations that contain grooming indicators. We will be integrating this tool into all of our chatting features to more effectively identify and escalate early indicators of predatory behaviour to our moderators. We will take strict action against accounts confirmed to have engaged in grooming and report to authorities in adherence with local laws and regulations.

We also partnered with Tech Coalition and have been actively involved in its working groups related to age assurance, online grooming prevention, and technology development with our industry peers to share knowledge and develop best practices.

Another important change we are implementing in our upcoming version update is the removal of media (image and video) sharing in private Direct Messages. While the decision to remove this feature was the result of many UX considerations, one of the key drivers for this project was to completely eliminate the risk of bad actors being able to privately spread CSAM.

What are some of your organisation’s greatest achievements and long-term goals for the future?

We established ZEPETO’s Trust & Safety team in January this year with the goal of setting a strong foundation and earning our community’s trust through humanity, transparency and reliability. Over the past 12 months, we are grateful to have been able to establish strategic partnerships with incredible organizations– like INHOPE, ConnectSafely, Tech Coalition, and more– to expand and strengthen our collaborative efforts to fight online CSAM.

In October this year, we unveiled our new reporting interface in the ZEPETO app to provide easier and more accessible ways to report child safety violations. Child safety-related violations are listed at the top of our reporting menu for the highest visibility and quicker access. Additionally, we created new resources aimed to educate and empower our community on important safety topics, including our Guardian’s Guide to ZEPETO, anti-grooming guide, and our in-app Clean ZEPETO quiz, which tests users on their understanding of acceptable conduct on our platform.

In 2023, we plan to publish our first Transparency Report to hold ourselves more accountable to our community and provide insight into the risks, realities, and strengths behind our platform and our efforts. Moreover, we plan to take even more strategic and deliberate steps to develop ways to keep our users safe by minimizing the risk of harm, effectively detecting harmful content and conduct, and continuing to grow our understanding of harm to address emerging trends.

Is there anything else you’d like to share?

We look forward to growing and strengthening our efforts in creating an internet free of CSAM with INHOPE and our partners.


Keep up to date with the latest work from our partners here.