The number of web pages featuring child sexual abuse that are being taken down globally has plummeted during the coronavirus pandemic, an internet watchdog has said.
The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK charity that identifies child sexual abuse content online, said 1,498 URLs were taken down between 16 March and 15 April after being identified as showing child sexual abuse.
This was an 89% reduction from the previous month, when 14,947 URLs on the IWF list were taken down.
The IWF said this could be because tech companies and law enforcement agencies were operating with reduced numbers of staff and did not have the capacity to take down the material.
Last month Facebook’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, said third-party US content moderators would be working from home and the company would increase its use of artificial intelligence to moderate content during the health crisis.
Susie Hargreaves, the chief executive of the IWF, said: “What we are seeing here is the first hard evidence of how the global crisis is affecting the fight against child sexual abuse material. Even though our analysts are working as normal to find this evil content, it is staying available for longer, even after they have reported it. This means there is more opportunity for sexual predators to view and share it.”
She added:“Hotlines and abuse teams across the globe need to be aware that there is a slowdown of this content being removed and to be mindful of doing what they can, within their ability, to get this content taken down.”
The IWF provides a list of child sexual abuse URLs, which companies use to block and filter so criminal content is not available through their services. When the imagery has been taken down, the URL comes off the list.
The IWF’s annual report says nine out of 10 webpages identified as featuring child sexual abuse, rape or torture are hosted on servers in Europe, with the vast majority held in the Netherlands.
In 2019, 89% of URLs known to contain child sexual abuse material were hosted in Europe, compared with 79% in 2018.
Of all the content found by the IWF, 71% – the equivalent of 93,962 URLs – was hosted in the Netherlands. This was an increase from 2018, when the Netherlands was found to be hosting 47% of all known child sexual abuse material.
The Netherlands has become a target for hosting child sexual abuse material due to its strong internet infrastructure, which makes it an easy place for any internet company to operate, offering low-cost hosting services, the IWF said.
North America hosted 9% of all known child sexual abuse URLs in 2019, a fall from 18% in 2018, the report says.
Hargreaves said the situation could worsen given increased concerns over activities of sexual predators online during the pandemic. Europol, the EU’s law enforcement agency, said early on in the crisis that it had seen “increased online activity by those seeking child abuse material”.
Hargreaves said: “We have seen a real and frightening jump in the amount of child sexual abuse material that is being hosted right on our doorstep here in Europe. No country is immune to this terrible criminality. While the UK doesn’t have the hosting issue, our problem is that many consumers of child sexual abuse live here. We’ve got to fight this on both fronts – both the supply and the demand.”
The IWF develops tools and provides services for technology companies to prevent the abuse of their platforms for child sexual abuse content.
Arda Gerkens, the chief executive of EKOM, which comprises the Dutch hotline for dealing with child sexual abuse as well as the helpline for victims of online sexual abuse, said: “The Netherlands is unfortunately the biggest webhosting country when it comes to this material. A strong and swift infrastructure combined with low costs, appeals to services that host images. Those services are often abused by people sharing this material.
“Acting on a notice to take down should be a last resort. It’s best if this material doesn’t come online at all.”
