Child sexual abuse material is on the rise online. Will lawmakers and big tech finally act? (via OnPointRadio)
, principal deputy chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section’s within the U.S. Department of Justice, Criminal Division.MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Jane remembers looking at the message on her phone. It was January 20, 2020.
DOE: So, you know, the first kick in the gut is that I think I know my kid and he's suicidal. And the second kick in the gut is that what is this video? Repeatedly, we reported it as child pornography material, tried to tell his age. They weren't going to take it down.CHAKRABARTI: There has been an explosion of child sexual abuse material online, on almost every social media platform in the world.
But even with such efforts, child sexual abuse content continues to swarm social media sites. And critics claim it’s because the companies themselves are willfully not doing enough. But that night, in January 2020, when 16-year-old John was suicidal, Jane discovered that a trafficker had in fact reached into their home and found their son three years earlier … through Snapchat.
DOE: I wish that he hadn't responded to it, but he was, you know, 13. And how many 13-year-old boys that have never seen anything like that, will do the same thing? At this point, John realized the person was lying about being a 16-year-old girl. He knew what was happening was wrong. But he didn't know how they got his number or Snapchat username.And then, the trafficker asked to meet in person. John refused.CHAKRABARTI: The trafficker stopped messaging him. And John prayed it was over. It was not.
According to court records, on December 25, 2019, someone sent Twitter a content alert about specific accounts that were posting child sexual abuse material. Twitter did not take action against those accounts. Jane and her son contacted school officials, law enforcement, and Twitter. They reported the video to Twitter on January 21st. Twitter replied the same day, and asked for documentation proving John's identity. The family sent a copy of his driver's license.
To say that they weren't going to do anything, and it didn't break any of their policies was mind blowing to me.CHAKRABARTI: It was also shocking to an agent from the Department of Homeland Security, whom Jane had contacted via a connection from her pastor. Jane and John Doe are suing Twitter. They claim the company benefited from violating federal law, specifically the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act. The case is currently pending before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
Twitter rejects the allegation that it knowingly assisted trafficking in John’s case. In a motion to dismiss, Twitter says it had no role in the creation of the videos, nor that it"knowingly provided any assistance to the perpetrators." CHAKRABARTI: Local law enforcement did open an investigation, but never positively identified a perpetrator.
FARID: The absolute bare minimum. And this is not a new trend. I got involved with Microsoft back in 2008 to try to combat the then growing, which has only exploded in the last decade and change. And the technology companies have been dragging their feet already for five years and they continue to drag their feet. They have good, don't get me wrong, they have good talking points. We have zero tolerance. We do X, we do Y.
SOURAS: The volume has really increased exponentially. So you heard in the opening in 2021, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received over 29 million reports. It's a tremendous number. It's a heartbreaking number. In 2022, we received over 32 million reports. And as Professor Farid was just detailing, not only do we see the numbers increasing, but we see that the types and the ways that children are victimized evolving as well.
But in fact, it is an adult. It is an offender who knows how to manipulate that child, how to get images from them. And then what? Once the images are shared, much as in the case that we heard in the opening, things turn very quickly. So we often see cases where children are then pressured, blackmailed into sending increasingly egregious imagery, sending more imagery, sending imagery where they are involved in abuse with other children. Upon threat that the original image will be shared online.
CHAKRABARTI: So your resource, as we said earlier, obviously it is illegal to possess and disseminate child sexual abuse material. It's a crime, and yet thus far successfully the platforms. And to Professor Farid's point, all of them have evaded liability. And even in the Twitter case that we talked about with John Doe, almost all of John's claims were dismissed by a judge because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
CHAKRABARTI: So, Professor Farid, I'd like to hear you on this. Because as we know, the platforms, the tech companies frequently point to Section 230, not just as a source of strict legal liability, but also in terms of, well, they don't want to get in the game of — this is what they say, of infringing on speech. Or be then eventually forced to say, do content moderation on other variously questionable activities, say drugs, weapons, terrorism, things like that.
And I think the global nature of this we should also highlight, to fight the online exploitation of children. And they have specially trained teams with backgrounds in law enforcement, online safety analytics and forensic investigations.
Copies of just six videos were responsible for more than half the child exploitative content in that time. And then they say, while the data indicates that the number of pieces of content does not equal the number of victims, that the same content potentially slightly altered, is being shared, obviously over and over and over again. How do you read that?
CHAKRABARTI: It also, again confounds me that Meta, which arguably has the largest data set of almost any company in the world, only chose two representative months to do this analysis on. But anyway, we have lot more to discuss about what more if anything, the tech companies can and should be doing to curb child sexual abuse material online.
ZUCKERBERG: Well, Congresswoman, I don't think Facebook is the only place on the Internet where this behavior is happening. I think the fact that the vast majority of those reports come from us reflects the fact that we actually do a better job than everyone else of finding it and acting on it. We still don't have effective technology to deal with grooming, with sextortion. And that's not, in my opinion, because we don't have the technological abilities to do it.But the problem, and if I can just come back to something you were talking about before the break, when Meta says, well, 90% of the videos are the same and there's only six videos. The problem is that they actually don't know that. Because all they can tell you is of the material we have found.
FARID: It doesn't. And Yiota got it exactly right earlier, which is they are trying to minimize what is actually happening on their platforms. And it's a particularly offensive thing to say to a victim. It's like, Oh, the person sharing this didn't really intend to harm you. First of all, you have no idea what their intent is. So stop pretending you do. This is a silly thing to say, and it doesn't matter. The material is illegal. And ...
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So what I would like to do now is just hear a little bit from someone in law enforcement who has to start working on this issue, because a few weeks ago, we spoke with Damon King, who is the principal deputy chief of the child Exploitation and Obscenity section within the U.S. Department of Justice. And he has been prosecuting cases on child sexual abuse material since the year 2000. And he says the problem has grown exponentially.
Let's say if a community newspaper, like a community, alt-type of paper that relied on submissions from the community like a.k.a. analog user generated content. And published it and some of it was this child sexual abuse material, like images of children.
It brings us 32 million reports of child sexual exploitation every year. And I'll just note on that number, that is only what is detected. A company has no obligation to try to detect, report or remove any of this content. So, again, the 32 million is only what a company has chosen to take efforts to find and to report.
CHAKRABARTI: So that was three years ago. Just this week, on Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee held another hearing on child safety online and they discussed child sexual abuse material. Here's Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri expressing frustration about why there's been so little progress in the past three years.
But behind closed doors, they are lobbying to squash any regulation that is going to hold their feet to the fire. And I think that's what's slowing this down. The good news is there are some very aggressive legislations coming out of Brussels, the E.U. and out of the U.K. and out of Australia. I think we should be embarrassed that those on the other side of the pond are much, much more progressive in trying to hold these companies responsible for the harms that they are creating.
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