“We need a clear regulatory blueprint for the policies and services needed from websites and platforms across the internet.” Interestingly, those words came from the CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan.
Unfortunately, as whistleblower Frances Haugen wrote recently in this publication, the U.S. technology sector’s public acceptance of online safety is belied by behind-the-scenes attacks on proposals — federal and state — to make the internet safer.
Regulation is common sense: Rules govern every industry to ensure products and services are safe for users and the public. Next month, the CEOs of Meta, Snap, Discord, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) will appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee to discuss online child sexual exploitation of children — a crime that, as executive director of International Justice Mission’s Center to End the Online Sexual Exploitation of Children, I have been fighting for over a decade.
Numerous online safety bills are pending before Congress. They aim to protect children from exposure to harmful content, such as suicide videos and violent pornography, and the documented adverse mental health impacts of social media as warned by the U.S. surgeon general.
One such bill, the EARN IT Act, is hyper-focused on the most severe form of online harm: child sexual abuse and exploitation. In 2022 alone, the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 32 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation containing more than 37 million videos and 49 million images.
Add to those all the real-time sexual abuse that is not reported, as global offenders pay adults in countries like the Philippines to livestream the sexual abuse of young children in video calls.
In a recently released study by International Justice Mission and the University of Nottingham Rights Lab, nearly half a million, or 1 in 100 Filipino children, were sexually abused in 2022 to create child sexual exploitation material sold to offenders globally.
I lived in the Philippines for seven years, leading International Justice Mission teams in partnership with Philippine and foreign law enforcement to protect children from abuse broadcast in live streams using the same tech platforms we all use every day. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Regulation can incentivize technology companies to prevent child sexual abuse online. And they should embrace it because the status quo — individual companies making internal policy decisions on if or how they address child sexual abuse on their platforms and apps — is ineffective.
After an onslaught of criticism from so-called privacy groups in 2021, Apple was bullied into abandoning its promising proposals to detect and report materials featuring child sexual exploitation on iCloud and Messages. Our absent legal framework means first-movers in online safety are punished, instead of rewarded.
The bipartisan EARN IT Act would change that by removing industry immunity for violations of child sexual exploitation laws, incentivizing technology companies to address the proliferation of child sexual exploitation online. I believe we need more proactive prevention and disruption of child sexual abuse material at scale. But the EARN IT Act wouldn’t just take my word for it.
Instead, the bill creates a national commission of experts with diverse experience to establish best practices for prevention — survivors, government officials, technical experts, data privacy and civil rights leaders — all present at the same table to determine a way forward to better protect children online, while ensuring privacy and free speech are still intact.
Alarmists argue that EARN IT will end privacy because companies will stop using end-to-end encryption. But nothing in the act makes encryption illegal. In fact, the only relevant language expressly protects encrypted platforms, providing that using encryption cannot be the basis for liability.
Moreover, contrary to popular belief, tech to detect and prevent child sexual exploitation material can co-exist with end-to-end encryption.
Hany Farid, UC Berkeley professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and co-developer of PhotoDNA, explained in a 2020 WIRED op-ed that “programs like PhotoDNA … can be adapted to work within this system.” Tech companies have used PhotoDNA for over a decade to detect, report and remove materials featuring child sexual exploitation at scale. Moreover, safety tech company SafeToNet claims it can detect and block the materials without breaking end-to-end encryption; so does Cyacomb Safety.
Broad adoption and use of sophisticated technology to prevent child sexual exploitation materials on devices and encrypted messaging apps may mean that Meta’s end-to-end encryption rollout need not endanger children worldwide, as child protection experts rightly fear.
Privacy-related objections amounting to slippery slope arguments should not stop us from protecting the safety and well-being of children and survivors. EARN IT critics fear a hypothetical future risk while dismissing real and widespread harm: Children are abused and exploited by the continued production, possession and distribution of their sexual abuse videos and images.
Today, online platforms remain fertile ground for child sexual abuse, according to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner in its December 2022 and October 2023 Basic Online Safety Expectations reports, revealing that companies are doing nothing to combat sexual abuse in video calls, even though they can by using safety technology tools.
Australia and the United Kingdom — both Western democratic societies that protect the values of privacy and free speech — passed online safety bills in 2021 and 2023, respectively. Our neighbors did it — we can too.
Smart companies will embrace this moment for a market advantage. In every industry, customers want products and services that are safe to use. No dad wants their daughter to be sent an unwanted sexual image. No mom wants her son groomed and financially sextorted to pay criminals or have intimate images shared online. Companies embracing safety by design as the new normal will capture a market of parents, corporations, governments and youth hungry for safe and healthy internet engagement.
But as Mohan and Apple’s 2021 fiasco made clear, a regulatory framework is necessary to enable companies to do so. And survivors themselves are advocating for the passage of these much-needed online safety protections to prevent further harm.
Online safety is at our fingertips. We can balance privacy and protection. Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, wrote about EARN IT and other proposed laws in this publication this year:
“These bills balance the need to protect free speech and the need to protect children from harm. But they make clear that we will no longer accept the current state of affairs, where social media companies make vast fortunes with the help of legal loopholes while children suffer.”
Vanessa Bautista — Global Survivor Network founding member and child sexual abuse survivor — put it plainly during her testimony at the House Judiciary Committee on the threat of exploitation of children:
“Even as we speak today, there are children that are being exploited … we have to do something, and we have to do it right now.”
John Tanagho serves as the executive director of International Justice Mission’s Center to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children. IJM is a global non-governmental organization that protects people in poverty from violence.