Over 90 per cent of child sexual abuse material present on the internet is now “self-generated” content, extorted from children victims, as young as three, according to a new report by an internet watchdog.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said it unearthed self-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on more than 275,655 websites in 2023, which was an increase of eight per cent from the previous year.
Out of these websites, 254,070, or 92 per cent, contained “self-generated” images or videos, with children under the age of 10 featuring on more than 100,000 websites which was an increase of 66 per cent on the year before. Kids between the ages of three and six were found on 2,500 of them.
Around, one in five websites contained Category A child abuse content – regarded as the most severe form of it.
“It does mean we’re detecting more, but I don’t think it’s ever a good thing if you’re finding loads more child sexual abuse,” said the watchdog’s chief executive Susie Hargreaves.
“Obviously the IWF would be most successful if we didn’t find any images of child sexual abuse. Our mission is the elimination of child sexual abuse – it’s not just to find as much as possible and take it down.”
Last month, the European Union (EU) regulators pulled Meta, asking the company to provide more details on measures it had taken to tackle CSAM available on its highly popular photo and video-sharing app Instagram.
Under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), big tech companies are required to do more to police illegal and harmful content on their platform.
EU pressing Meta for information came after a Wall Street Journal report last year claimed that Instagram was struggling to clean child sexual abuse material.
The report added that Instagram’s algorithms were connecting a series of accounts which were being used for making, buying and trading underage sex content.
Although IWF did not mention Meta in the report, it is one of the watchdogs that has been extremely critical of the tech giant.
It has criticised the Mark Zuckerberg-owned company for rolling out the end-to-end encryption service to Facebook Messenger which will make it easier for predators to exploit young victims and make their detection even harder.
(With inputs from agencies)
