In America, a child is bought or sold for sexual exploitation every two minutes. Increasingly, this abuse happens online, where predators distribute child sexual abuse material, recruit minors into sex trafficking rings, and extort children into sharing explicit images of themselves. Just last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received a staggering 36.2 million reports of online child sexual exploitation — a 23% increase from 2021.
NCMEC — whose CyberTipline serves as the country’s centralized reporting system for online child abuse — does incredible work to track these crimes and report them to law enforcement, resulting in arrests of predators across the country, including in Tennessee. But, tragically, many more acts of online sexual abuse against children go unreported.
One big reason why: Although criminal law requires electronic service providers to report any child sex abuse material on their sites, online platforms — including Big Tech sites such as Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram — have no obligation to report content involving the sex trafficking or grooming of children or enticement crimes.
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