The WeProtect Global Alliance (WPGA) has published its latest “Threat Assessment”. It makes grim but essential reading and is an important source of new data across a range of headings. Here are just a few examples: there has been an 87% growth in csam reports since 2019. 32 milllion reports were analysed by NCMEC in 2022. 60% of online abuse involved a perpetrator likely known to the child. The Threat Assessment also notes there has been a significant rise in sextortion and sexual abuse of children via live streaming.
What is absent is a section like this.
How threats to children have reduced since our first report and the previous one
Why is there no such heading? Because it would be followed by a big fat blank. With occasional dips and wobbles, for years now the trend, all the numbers, have been going in the same direction. The wrong one.
Why is that? I know I will sound a bit like a broken record, as we used to say in pre-digital days, and it may be tedious to repeat it but the answer is blindingly obvious.
Self-regulation is not yet dead everywhere. Unfortunately
Globally we are still living largely under a regime of self-regulation. It is a hangover from the early days of the internet when Governments had little understanding of the internet and, like the rest of us, were dazzled by the carefully nurtured and assiduously promoted vision of its potential to do good in many different ways: economically, politically, socially, educationally, the lot. Science and technology would lead us to the sunny uplands…… you get the idea.
When a few unforseen problems started to emerge, not unnaturally, against such a backdrop, politicians were only too ready to trust industry leaders to “sort it out”. They even gave them unique legal protections. Ah! The innocence. All Governments and the rest of us had to do was leave them alone to get on with it. We now know how that worked out. See above. The scales have fallen from (most of ) our eyes.
Gimme wiggle room
Within online businesses much of the child safety and wider consumer agenda is marked as an overhead cost not a profit centre so it keeps slipping down the corporate list of priorities. Companies will obey clearly stated laws. But the unvarnished truth is many are also willing to exploit any and all available wiggle room or ambiguity to minimise or delay the extent of their engagement with anything which does not contribute directly to the bottom line. If it makes them money they need no further encouragement. If it doesn’t, they do.
Let me just repeat the words of the Australian e-Safety Commissioner in her first statutory Transparency Report, published late last year.
“some of the biggest and richest technology companies …. are turning a blind eye, failing to take appropriate steps to protect the most vulnerable from the most predatory”.
Nearly a year later, in her second Transparency Report it seems nothing much has changed.
And yet most of the companies to which the Commisioner refers are “members” of the WPGA. They each have it within their power to deprive the Australian e-Safety Commissioner of the possibility of using words of the kind she deployed. But they don’t.
Globally aligned?
The 2023 WPGA Threat Assessment contains these words
“Globally aligned internet regulation has significant potential to boost the response by incentivising consistent action from platforms to tackle harm.”
I have to wonder where those words come from. In today’s world? With geopolitics as they are? Who benefits from that? Not children. We might just as well say we’ll do it the next time a unicorn hoves into view.
In the UK several, if not all of the Big Tech players in the WPGA lobbied against crucial parts of the Online Safety Bill, either directly or indirectly through trade bodies. They lost but they are now doing the same in Brussels in respect of the EU’s excellent proposed Regulation to prevent and combat child sexual abuse. Some of the bits I am proudest of in the UK legislation – parts that address the prevention of child sexual abuse – are among the bits Big Tech is going hardest against in Brussels. Go figure.
Time to change the terms of the debate
When they were formed the WPGA and a number of other bodies were very much a product of their time. It was still just about possible to believe we were “all good chaps” striving for the same ends. It was just about possible to believe we could sit in a room together, look for and eventually agree words, not just cosmetically to get someone off a hook, but to reflect a serious intention to change how companies actually behaved, particularly in respect of detecting, deleting and reporting csam, likely csam and grooming activity.
It is impossible to believe this any more. See above. Fine words butter no parsnips. Earnest declarations of how you “take this issue very seriously” lose some of their edge when you’ve heard them for the 578th time.
Of course we need to keep talking to industry
Children’s advocates have a job to do. It is to defend children’s existing rights or where necessary expand them as new situations arise.
What we really should not do is get sucked into the Silicon Valley PR machine, handing out halos which allow companies to duck and dive, pointing to their membership of this or that, or their funding of x or y as proof of…..
Our role models should be campaigning organizations, pressure groups, trade unions, bodies like Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and similar. So, yes, we must continue to engage with Big Tech. But there ought to be no confusion about the nature of the relationship. Enough already with the fuzzy boundaries.
Desiderata 