Internet.gov: Tech Companies as Government Agents and the Future of the Fight Against Child Sexual Abuse - California Law Review

The online proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), commonly referred to as child pornography, is a problem of massive scale. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private nonprofit specially authorized by Congress to serve as the nation’s clearinghouse for reports of CSAM imagery, works with law enforcement to locate perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse. In 2019, NCMEC received over sixty-nine million reports of CSAM, many of them from tech platforms like Google and Facebook. The proliferation of CSAM online can, in part, be attributed to the under-regulation of tech platforms. While Silicon Valley giants like Facebook have devoted some resources to the problem, these efforts are limited and flawed. Considering both their resources and their direct role in spreading CSAM, tech companies—even large ones—do very little to proactively combat child sexual abuse. That is because the current legal framework requires very little of them. For

The online proliferation of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), commonly referred to as child pornography, is a problem of massive scale. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), a private nonprofit specially authorized by Congress to serve as the nation’s clearinghouse for reports of CSAM imagery, works with law enforcement to locate perpetrators and victims of child sexual abuse. In 2019, NCMEC received over sixty-nine million reports of CSAM, many of them from tech platforms like Google and Facebook. The proliferation of CSAM online can, in part, be attributed to the