Summary Former Facebook executive says that such online activities exist due to faster internet access and g
(Web Desk) – In a rapid fast growing digital age, the access to the World Wide Web has become easy due to smart phones and super-fast internet, which has disturbingly led to a surge in on-demand, live streaming online child sexual abuse.
Founder of WeProtect, and former Facebook Inc. executive, Joanna Shields said that such online activities exist due to faster internet access and greater accessibility to smart phones, according to Bloomberg.
“These criminals are feeling emboldened”.
A report published by a children’s welfare group, WeProtect, shows that such advances have led to a drop in the cost of accessing a live video stream of child abuse to as little as $15 from about $50 a few years ago.
Statista’s research group showed the average-selling price of a smart phone has gradually fallen from $349 in 2011 to $229 in 2018.
“They can speak to communities of other people like them and they feel safe,” said Shields, who has served as the head of Facebook’s Europe, Middle East and Africa arm and as a digital adviser to the British government.
WeProtect report was compiled with input from Interpol, the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.K.’s National Crime Agency and Swedish software firm NetClean.
The circulation of child sexual exploitation imagery has risen enormously because of consumer technology. In 1990, the Internet Watch Foundation reported that in U.K. only the estimated number of images in circulation is to be around 7,000. In 2017, it was not uncommon for police to seize hundreds of thousands of images from individuals.
WeProtect’s report highlights that a system deployed by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection to automatically identify abuse images on the web - Project Arachnid - now identifies 80,000 unique images worldwide every month.
Self-producing content
Internet Watch Foundation, in a separate report analysed images that depict children aged 10 years or younger has declined in just two years – from 80 percent in 2014 to 53 percent in 2016.
However, the numbers have risen for children aged 11 years to 15 years – from 18 percent in 2014 to 45 percent in 2016.
This is partly attributed to the greater likelihood that people will report the abuse of much younger children, but also that teenagers are “self-producing” content.
People will report the abuse of much younger children, but also that teenagers are “self-producing” content. Photo: Reuters
“There s an epidemic of young people sharing sexual images of themselves,” said Shields. “There’s a strange phenomenon where young people sort of test each other out through messaging and share images before they even bother to go out,” she said.
Shields said this has resulted in paedophiles increasingly creating fake profiles on networks that appeal to children in order to pose as a minor.
“There are organised crime entities that do this and extort money from children,” she said, adding that these images are often now used as a form of “currency” to exchange for entry into hidden paedophile rings hosted on the dark web.
Role of social media
Major companies are introducing various types of digital protection such as Microsoft Inc.’s PhotoDNA technology that uses digital fingerprinting system allowing the companies to instantly match images uploaded to their platforms to known duplicates.
Twitter Inc. and Facebook both use it to identify and remove any known photographs of graphic abuse.
Moreover, in 2016, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and Google’s YouTube collaborated to use similar methods to identify terrorist content as well.
But Shields says the world’s biggest technology companies are not doing enough.
“These companies embrace communities of advertisers and developers,” she said, "and they need to embrace the community of charities and support organisations that are dealing with the problems that these children have.”
Shields suggested that if the issue became a top concern of shareholders, “it would be an existential crisis” for these businesses.
This story originally appeared on Bloomberg.
