For the first time ever, on January 31, five Big Tech CEOs from Meta, X, Snap, TikTok and Discord are being called to testify on their failures to protect children online. Pressure has been mounting especially over the last year as the Senate Judiciary Committee has introduced several bipartisan bills to help stop the exploitation of kids online.
Child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, is any content that depicts sexually explicit activities involving a child. This devastating crime has severe and lifelong consequences for survivors, and the online sharing of this material traumatizes victims long after the abuse has ended. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an exponential increase in online sexual exploitation and abuse of children (known as OSEAC). To give a scale of this epidemic, in 2019, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) received 16.9 million reports of CSAM to their CyberTipline. In 2022, that number nearly doubled, to over 32 million reports, marking the highest number of reports ever received in one year.
