“I’m not a so-called ‘diplomat brat,’ but you might say I’m an ‘MNC brat,’” she laughs. “We moved every four years because my father worked for Bayer, a German chemicals and pharmaceuticals company. So I was born in India but grew up in Germany, and then I spent a lot of time in the US, where I studied cultural anthropology and international affairs.” 

Unlike her less itinerant peers, Priyanka admits she doesn’t have lifelong or childhood friends, and is not tied to a strong cultural identity.  

“But it’s also an advantage because in a sense, I fit in everywhere,” she says. “I’ve dealt with many environments and people, I speak five languages, and I have a deeper understanding of cultural nuances, which might fly by someone who has only lived in one context and place.”  

After years of travelling for work, Priyanka is now based in Singapore, where she has been a safety policy manager at Meta for over a year. “My job at Meta is literally a culmination of everything that I’ve done in my career,” she says.  

Read on for Priyanka’s story, in her own words. 

Dr Priyanka Bhalla, Safety Policy Manager, Meta 

Having lived in countries where the socioeconomic background of the population is really diverse, I grew up acutely aware of the need to bridge gender and education gaps. Later in life, a third area that I became interested in was people on the move—whether it's refugees, internally displaced persons, or asylum seekers—and the unique issues they have to face while dealing with sudden crises and trying to integrate into a new society. 

At the same time, my career ambition was to remain ‘international’ and stay on the move. In the last two decades, my work with the UN, the Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), as well as with smaller NGOs, has taken me to countries in Central America, as well as South and Southeast Asia. I’ve worked on projects relating to indigenous land rights, humanitarian relief, gender mainstreaming, and gender-based violence prevention.  

This has put me in a unique position, where if I’m speaking to an international contact, oftentimes, I have either directly worked in their country, or there's a big chance I've travelled to neighbouring countries or places that are culturally similar. And when someone asks what needs to be done on the ground, or what NGO concerns might be, I have an immediate understanding of what they're after, because of my lived experience. I know that you can read about what’s happening and gain a lot of knowledge. But there's something to be said about the value of lived experience, and being able to connect with people through that. 

Building a Policy Career in Singapore 

Now that I’m a mother of two young kids, I’ve put a pause on my travels to settle in Singapore, where I can still help to drive social change in the world. Right before joining Meta, I worked for two years at a Singapore-based tech startup called Quilt.AI, where I managed their social impact programme. This involved researching issues such as online misogyny across social media platforms, and misinformation in areas like women's sexual and reproductive health, so that we could run campaigns to promote behaviour change for good. For instance, we launched a huge campaign in the Indian state of Rajasthan, where we came up with multiple online interventions to influence the attitudes of millions of boys on issues like consent and contraception. 

At Meta, my responsibilities as a safety policy manager are a combination of everything that I’ve described so far. It took multiple interviews to secure this job, and the pace is super-fast—one year working in this company is like three years anywhere else! Even though Meta has scaled a lot, it still functions like a tech startup. You have to keep learning and evolving, and every month, something new happens. 

One of the projects I regularly support on, is a tool that we developed in partnership  with SWGfL/UK Revenge Porn Helpline . The tool is called StopNCII.org, where NCII stands for non-consensual intimate images that are taken in a private setting, where one is nude or partially nude. One of the most common instances of this is when a woman’s ex-partner shares these images without her consent on social media platforms. When someone is concerned their intimate images have been posted or might be posted to online platforms they can create a case through StopNCII.org to proactively detect them. The tool features hash-generating technology that assigns a unique hash value (a numerical code) to an image or video, creating a secure digital fingerprint in a privacy preserving way. Participating companies, which include Meta, TikTok and Bumble, only use the hash they receive from StopNCII.org to identify images that someone has shared or is trying to share on their platforms; the original image never leaves the person’s device. Only hashes, not the images themselves, are shared with StopNCII.org and participating tech platforms. This feature prevents further circulation of that NCII content and keeps those images securely in the possession of the owner. If someone tries to upload a matching image on one of the participating companies’ platforms, the company reviews the content on their platform to check if it violates their policies and take action accordingly.  

Even though this tool exists, we still need to figure out how to contextualise it for everyone—how can it be best used in each country, and who are the industry partners that should be involved? For example, we would want to make sure that the tool is also connected to organisations who can give survivors emotional support, because having private images shared against your will can be a very traumatic experience. 

A Journey of Growth, Resilience, and Hope 

Work aside, returning to school has also been an essential part of my career growth.



For those interested in a career like mine, it's important to have either international development experience or public policy experience with a specific government, as well as tech knowledge relating to regulation and global or regional development. At Meta, we're constantly tracking the different regulations across countries, how they relate to technological developments, and what it means in terms of compliance for our company.  

And whether you want to work specifically for Meta or just a tech company in general, it’s good to have an awareness about the technology itself. Within tech companies, there is sometimes a divide, where the policy folks might know about regulations and theories, while the engineers will have the internal tech and product knowledge. I’m not a tech expert by any means, but I know the basics to ask questions like “Why isn’t this classifier working well?” or “How can the training data be improved?” And if someone from the tech team talks to me about a specific product, I might have in my head other products that I’ve worked on, and we can have a meaningful discussion. 

It must also be said that doing the sort of work that I’ve done—where I’ve worked directly with people in difficult circumstances during my humanitarian projects —I’ve had to develop a thick skin. This included, for example, directly working with gender-based violence survivors post disasters. Have I sought counselling? Absolutely, because there have been points in my life where I've needed that. Or I might’ve said to a colleague, “Listen, I’ve dealt with this for too many days. Can you take this on?” So there’s been different ways of coping with things. 

But honestly, my work isn’t all doom and gloom! Many of my projects have been about harnessing positivity and educating communities. I do still feel hopeful about the state of the world, and I still believe there’s a lot of good to be done, which people want to do, and are motivated to do. That’s what keeps me going.