More, serious child abuse found on the Web

20 Apr 2007

Summary

According to the latest annual report of the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), the U.S. hosts 62% of the child pornography commercially distributed online. The report also discloses a trend toward depicting ever younger child victims in more graphic and sadistic acts, finding that there has been a "four-fold increase in the number of images involving severe abuse such as penetrative and sadistic sexual activity…. 'This is babies, toddlers and pre-pubescent children suffering some of the most horrific abuse, an IWF spokeswoman told Reuters." Read the article.

Things to think about when reading this article

If you aren’t outraged and horrified by the depravity outlined by the IWF report and motivated to demand action from any content hosting site you use, let me strengthen your concerns.

The industry, including the companies which allow people to post images and videos, has known for years that enormous and growing volumes of child pornography are being transmitted through their networks and hosted on their Web sites. I’m referring to services that offer file sharing, blogging social networking, e-mail, IM, peer-to-peer networking, and so on. The industry has also known that the victims were steadily getting younger and the savagery depicted increasingly brutal. (Read the validation for these claims.)

With few exceptions, hosting companies have chosen simply not to look at the content being sent, taking down sites and images only when consumers report a problem. This approach offers these companies four benefits:

1. Content hosting services can claim ignorance of their role in the distribution of abuse images and avoid penalties. If they looked for bad content and missed some, they could be held liable.
    
2. It’s a lot cheaper to do nothing. It’s expensive to build tools that filter, track, and defend against abuse. Several content hosting services in the U.S. do use some rudimentary tools in some of their products; but I don’t know of a single Internet services company that has robust image filtering and abuse tracking and defense systems in all products.
    
   So what does existing image filtering technology do to prevent the distribution of child pornography and other illegal images? In most cases when a user uploads images to a host server, the images are automatically posted. Then, if the content hosting service filters images, the automated tool will scan them within a specified amount of time—usually the time lag is between 8 and 24 hours. (Think of how many people might see these in the interim.)
    
3. Consumers serve as the front line for reporting abuse. Content hosting services comply with the law requiring known images of abuse to be taken down using "free" labor - YOU. This means, however, that these the companies are abusing you and other customers of all ages by potentially exposing you to shocking images you may never be able to forget.
    
4. Revenue. Child pornography drives a lot of online traffic. Sites which host consumer generated content make their money from advertisements on every page you view—the more pages you view, the more money they make. Few review the content on a page (remember, most don’t want to know and specifically aren’t looking); they simply drop ads on the page frames around whatever content is there. This means that companies profit every time someone views a page of child pornography with advertising in the frame. Conversely, taking down or blocking illegal content from being uploaded reduces potential revenue from the traffic the site generates.—it also means that companies and organizations like Pepsi and AARP find their ads placed next to child pornography.

Now, change is in the wind, although to date it has been the faintest of breezes. In the summer of 2006, a coalition of content hosting services in the U.S. formed to combat child pornography being distributed through their services. Their labor has yet to bear fruit, but change can take time.

What you can do stop the distribution of child pornography

The status quo is not acceptable. Demand the following three actions from every content hosting service that you use:

1. Companies must filter images before they are posted. (This wouldn’t even be visible to the user because image scanning takes less than 1/10th of a second.) Then, based on the scan results they can:
   • Send images that are known to be illegal directly to the authorities with information about the user who tried to send it.
   • Delay posting for a human to review if the scanning software determines the image is likely to be illegal or inappropriate, notifying the person who posts it of the delay.
   • Display any images that the technology has rated as "clean." 
      
2. Companies must create and maintain established processes to address any dispute of an image filtering decision.
    
3. Companies must provide an easy, discoverable way for all users to report abuse should they find it or be the victim of it. (No filter will be perfect and some bad images will get through, although as tools improve this should be less of a problem.)

These services are owned by companies who collectively rake in billions of dollars claiming to have standards—usually called Codes of Conduct, Policies, or Terms and Conditions. But standards cut both ways. In the same way that content hosting services require you to respect and abide by their standards, you have the right to demand that these companies proactively uphold the standards they claim to maintain. Having an automated process to scan images is a reasonable step to ensure that they uphold their professed standards and their implicit promise to consumers.

The failure of content hosting sites to meet their own standards not only makes them collaborators in the distribution of (and potentially beneficiaries of revenue from) this horrific trade in human suffering; it also breaches the trust that decent people have placed in these companies to give them a positive online experience.

Here’s how to contact the top hosting companies:

• AOL makes calling painful, but if you persist you’ll reach a human. Call 800-827-6364 (toll free). If you Press 0 at each prompt, ignoring messages, you’ll finally be rewarded.
   
• Google gets kudos because they make speaking to a human easy. Call 650-623-4000 and Press 0 to reach someone.
   
• MSN also makes calling painful, but you can get through to a human. Call 800-386-5550 (toll free). Say "agent" at each prompt until offered a representative, and then say "yes."
   
• Yahoo! Call 866-562-7219. When you get the phone menu, just keep pressing 0 (zero) while ignoring any error messages you hear.
   
• MySpace Send email to customercare@MySpace.com.

To learn more about how to protect yourself when social networking, read Chapter 9 ("Reduce your vulnerability when blogging") in Look Both Ways: Help protect your family on the Internet.

Additional sources documenting the known increase in online images of child exploitation

• Child Pornography "The development and creation of new technology has facilitated the proliferation of child pornography… Consumers who use the Internet can also get involved in fighting child pornography by pressuring their Internet Service Providers (ISP) to clean up their servers and remove illegal newsgroups that carry child pornography." 
   
• House Passes Stupak Amendment to Up Funding for Fighting Online Child Pornography (May 2006) "'3.5 million pornographic images of children are now estimated to be in circulation,’ Stupak said. ‘Online child pornography is a growing, multi-billion dollar industry that must be stopped.'" 
   
• Technology And The Fight Against Child Porn (Feb 2005) The CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) logged a 39% increase in reports of possession, creation, or distribution of child pornography in 2004. This was the seventh consecutive year child-pornography has trended upward since the federally funded group set up its 24-hour hot line in 1998.
   
• Illegal Child Pornography Becoming One of the Fastest Growing Internet Businesses (Aug 2005) "NCMEC's congressionally mandated CyberTipline received 21,603 reports of child pornography in 2001, and in 2004 it received 106,176 reports - a 491% increase over a four-year period."
   
• Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes (Nov 2005) According to a report from an United Nations organization, ECPAT International, weak laws and fragmented industry action are exposing children around the world to increasingly serious violence through the Internet and other cyber technologies. The study leader, Prof. Pinheiro states, "This report gives the global community no excuse for saying that 'we didn’t know' or 'we couldn’t foresee' the exponentially increasing violence caused to children in relation to new information and communication technologies."