Recent News
Swipe, See, Suffer — Snapchat’s Sexualized Snapshots
When police knocked with a search warrant about inappropriate material on Snapchat, their first question was who sent it—our son had no answer. That moment captures a widening emergency: Snapchat’s algorithmic feeds routinely surface sexualized and exploitative content beyond friend networks, exposing adolescents and emerging adults to grooming, trauma, and cascading legal and disciplinary fallout.
New Research Exposes How Offenders Search for and Share CSAM Online
To address a critical gap in understanding how active offenders search for and share CSAM, Ofcom partnered with Protect Children on an unprecedented anonymous survey of individuals who used the dark web to find this material. The findings offer rare insight into offender behavior and technology use — but they represent only one part of the problem.
This research does not capture the vast number of individuals who encounter or access CSAM on the open web through Google searches, mainstream social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, or through apps such as Snapchat. The scale of harm on the “surface web” remains significantly under‑measured.
In today’s digital environment, it is crucial not to jump to conclusions about the many young people being placed on sex‑offender registries for possession of CSAM. A significant portion may have been exposed to illegal material long before they understood what they were seeing, or before they had the developmental maturity to process it. Some may have encountered CSAM through algorithmic pathways, peer‑to‑peer sharing, or accidental exposure — not through deliberate predatory behavior.
Not a Dark‑Web Issue: CSAM Thrives on Social Media, and Prevention Is Urgent
Support Beyond Stigma continues to ask a fundamental question: why isn’t the Senate demanding that these companies implement filters to prevent illegal images from being uploaded in the first place? Why focus on reporting after the harm is done rather than on prevention?
After Babel - The Case Against Social Media: Seven Lines of Evidence
Once again, After Babel has published an exceptional article discussing the extremely negative impacts social media has on our younger generations. In a recent article, it outlines the seven lines of evidence that will help decide thousands of future court cases.
Social Media Finally Held Accountable for Misleading Practices
Recent legal outcomes penalizing social media companies for misleading practices are taking hold. How long will it be until they are held accountable for allowing CSAM to be uploaded to their sites, and only reporting the harm afterwards? The recent decision against Meta may be a clue.