20M child sexual abuse images on Facebook in 2020, report says
Facebook had more than 20 million child sexual abuse images on its platform in 2020, according to a report by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“You don’t want to talk to your kids about sexual exploitation, you don’t want to talk to the kids about sex or pornography,” said Rezsaun Lewis, a father of five. But Lewis says he has already talked to his kids about pornography, fearing exploitative images of children may pop up on their feeds.
“To be sexually abused and then for it to be put on camera and for millions of strangers to watch it for enjoyment, that’s sick,” said Lewis.
In 2020, 1,400 companies reported over 21 million incidents related to child pornography. Google had over 546,00 incidents; TikTok over 22,000.
“We are talking about crime scene photos,” said NCMEC's Lauren Coffren. “We're taking about the sexual abuse of the child that unfortunately has been memorialized.”
Coffren believes the numbers could be even higher than reported.
“The real story behind it is that some companies are making an awful lot of reports and some companies are not making a lot of reports,” said Coffren.
Facebook released a statement after doing their own analysis, sharing findings that “90% of this content was the same as or visually similar to previously reported content.” PornHub, which had over 13,000 incidents, said that the number includes several thousand duplicates. Coffren says the same images may be shared repeatedly, creating multiple reports and re-victimizing children.
“We have victims who are 20 years pass the actual hands-on or contact of use, and they are still suffering as a victim because the imagery is still being distributed,” said Coffren. “It’s the crime that never ends.”
Lewis says he isn’t planning to take his kids off of social media, but realizes that talking to them about pornographic imagery isn’t enough.
“As a parent I make a point of it to put certain restraints on my kids phone, there’s parental blocks on everything,” said Lewis.
https://komonews.com/news/nation-world/20m-child-sexual-abuse-images-on-facebook-in-2020-report-says