Latest in child exploitation
Enhancing platform transparency doesn’t have to mean giving abusers a road map to circumventing online service providers’ systems and rules for keeping users safe.
Tor hidden services are intended to help dissidents and whistleblowers. Instead, they have provided a false sense of security to users and created a platform for child sexual exploitation.
Child exploitation images are a horrific problem. Even the most clinical descriptions (such as the 23 sites described in the Freedom Hosting NIT warrant application) turn the stomach and chill the soul. Many individuals and companies, such as Facebook, go to extraordinary efforts to fight this menace.
On Sept. 28, the New York Times published a harrowing, in-depth investigative story on the prevalence of child pornography on the internet. The piece describes a staggering increase in the number of reports to the federal National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) flagging child sexual abuse imagery online from an already-high one million in 2014 to an almost unfathomable 18.4 million in 2018—an increase of almost 1,750 percent in just four years.
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