The Lost Children of the Kids’ Online Safety Debate
Proposals for tech regulation are proliferating in Washington, D.C., and state capitals nationwide. Under the banner of protecting children’s online safety, Congress and state legislatures are considering bills to regulate algorithms, to restrict broad and vaguely defined categories of speech (even speech that isn’t harmful to most children), and to foist age verification requirements upon social media platforms…or upon app stores… or upon devices themselves (and more, much more).
The regulation of technology in the United States is in danger of coming to resemble a graffiti-covered city underpass: a confused and disjointed jumble, its principles in conflict and its provisions lacking any sort of coherence or cohesion. (RELATED: Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online)
Worse still, all these efforts pass over the worst danger to children that lurks in shadows: the danger of child predation.
CSAM is not a problem to be solved by social media regulation, but one to be solved by law enforcement.
Children online have been — and, as I write, are being — made the victims at scale of the creators, purveyors, and consumers of child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Indeed, The New York Times reported that, from 1998 to 2018, reports of CSAM multiplied more than six thousandfold, from 3,000 to 18.4 million — annually. But lawmakers, distracted by proposals to regulate the working of technology companies, have neglected to fund or carry out the law enforcement efforts needed to thwart or apprehend criminals and protect their victims.
CSAM is not a problem to be solved by social media regulation, but one to be solved by law enforcement. Private companies are no substitute for the men and women equipped with tremendous investigatory powers, guns, handcuffs, and the legal sanction to deploy force to stop predators and protect children. The worst perpetrators often prove not to be lone perverts in the proverbial basement but sophisticated criminal organizations, often headquartered in foreign countries. The modus operandi of the Yahoo Boys, an African syndicate, for instance, is to create fake accounts, solicit explicit images from teenage boys, and extort them for monetary gain. The psychological pressure imposed upon their victims is intense; the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation “was able to verify that more than 40 suicides across North America, Australia and U.K. in the last four years were linked to sextortion,” the outlet reported last October.
Social media platforms have proven unable to best this formidable adversary — and nobody ought to have expected otherwise. In no part of the economy are businesses expected to do the work of policemen: A grocery store or pharmacy hounded by gangs of shoplifters looks to the police, and not to its own management or employees, for assistance, protection, and justice.
Nonetheless, technology platforms have worked manfully to use those limited means at their disposal to thwart online predators. “Meta said in 2024 it had taken down 63,000 sextortion accounts linked to Nigeria in a single sweep, including 2,500 that formed part of a coordinated network targeting Western teenagers,” the BBC reports. Of 20 million CyberTipline reports received that same year by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, Meta alone supplied more than 13 million.
“Think about that: a private company calling 911 13 million times,” writes Maureen Flatley, the president of Stop Child Predators. “And law enforcement bodies, starved of personnel, training and digital forensics capacity, answered only a fraction of those calls.”
A tiny fraction indeed. In a “90-day period, there were 99,172 IP addresses throughout the U.S. distributing known CSAM images and videos through peer-to-peer networks,” a 2023 Stop Child Predators white paper observes. Only 782, however, a small fraction of one percent, were investigated, “even though 75 percent of similar cases result in ‘successful prosecutions.’” The result: predators traversing the digital domain with near impunity, moving from one fake account to the next, from one victim to the next. Only one solution prevents serial criminals from continuing to commit their offences: arrest, prosecution, and imprisonment.
That lawmakers have declined to provide necessary funding to law enforcement, and that the Department of Justice has failed to comply with its statutory obligations to allocate those resources which it has received from Congress, amounts to a deep failure of governance, driving down to the foundations of our compact. Legislation such as the Invest in Child Safety Act, introduced in the 118th Congress by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), must be enacted and expanded upon.
It may be trite to say, but it is true: Americans believe that governments are instituted among men for the purpose of securing rights — rights that stand prior to any human association, rights endowed by a source beyond ourselves. The right of children to be safe from the crimes of child predators must be secured, as well in the digital world as in the physical one.
READ MORE from David B. McGarry:
Parents Have Everything They Need to Keep Their Children Safe Online
Conservative Principles Lost in Tech Regulation
David B. McGarry is the research director at the Taxpayers Protection Alliance. He also writes for Young Voices.