More than 90% of child sexual abuse imagery found on the internet is now self-generated, according to the charity responsible for finding and removing such material.
The Internet Watch Foundation said that it discovered self-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) featuring children under 10 on more than 100,000 webpages in the last year. That figure is an increase of 66% on the year before. In total, a record 275,655 webpages were confirmed to contain CSAM, the IWF said, an increase of 8%. The new data prompted a renewed attack on end-to-end encryption from the UK government, backed by the IWF.
The rise in imagery discovered and removed is not necessarily problematic, said the charity’s chief executive Susie Hargreaves, as some of the increase could be accounted for by better detection.
