Published: Tue 23 Apr 2024
Last year was the “most extreme year on record” for child sexual abuse online, U.K.-based charity Internet Watch Foundation warned on Tuesday, citing a disturbing rise in explicit materials that predators coerced victims into making—urging tech companies and online platforms to take swift action amid sluggish regulation and rising dangers from artificial intelligence.
The IWF, a charity that helps identify and remove child sexual abuse imagery online, said it found a 275,652 webpages containing, advertising or linking to child sexual abuse imagery in 2023, a new record.
“Each URL could contain one, tens, hundreds or even thousands of individual child sexual abuse images or videos,” the report said, nearly all of which (92%) contained self-generated content where the “victim had been coerced, blackmailed, or groomed into performing sexual acts over a webcam.”
The figure, which IWF said was obtained through “proactive searching” and analyzing nearly 400,000 reports coming in from more than 50 reporting portals around the world, marks an 8% increase from the year before.
Read the full article at Forbes.
Messaging app Telegram will deploy new tools to prevent the spread of images of child sexual abuse after teaming up with the Internet Watch Foundation.
After years of ignoring pleas to sign up to child protection schemes, the controversial messaging app Telegram has agreed to work with an internationally recognised body to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The images that Nelson made have been linked back to real children around the world. In some cases, he then went on to encourage his clients to rape and sexually assault the youngsters.