child sexual abuse materials

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Millions of OnlyFans paywalls make it hard to detect child sex abuse, cops say

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Millions of OnlyFans paywalls make it hard to detect child sex abuse, cops say

OnlyFans’ paywalls make it hard for police to detect child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on the platform, Reuters reported—especially new CSAM that can be harder to uncover online.

Because each OnlyFans creator posts their content behind their own paywall, five specialists in online child sexual abuse told Reuters that it’s hard to independently verify just how much CSAM is posted. Cops would seemingly need to subscribe to each account to monitor the entire platform, one expert who aids in police CSAM investigations, Trey Amick, suggested to Reuters.

OnlyFans claims that the amount of CSAM on its platform is extremely low. Out of 3.2 million accounts sharing “hundreds of millions of posts,” OnlyFans only removed 347 posts as suspected CSAM in 2023. Each post was voluntarily reported to the CyberTipline of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which OnlyFans told Reuters has “full access” to monitor content on the platform.

However, that intensified monitoring seems to have only just begun. NCMEC just got access to OnlyFans in late 2023, the child safety group told Reuters. And NCMEC seemingly can’t scan the entire platform at once, telling Reuters that its access was “limited” exclusively “to OnlyFans accounts reported to its CyberTipline or connected to a missing child case.”

Similarly, OnlyFans told Reuters that police do not have to subscribe to investigate a creator’s posts, but the platform only grants free access to accounts when there’s an active investigation. That means once police suspect that CSAM is being exchanged on an account, they get “full access” to review “account details, content, and direct messages,” Reuters reported.

But that access doesn’t aid police hoping to uncover CSAM shared on accounts not yet flagged for investigation. That’s a problem, a Reuters investigation found, because it’s easy for creators to make a new account, where bad actors can mask their identities to avoid OnlyFans’ “controls meant to hold account holders responsible for their own content,” one detective, Edward Scoggins, told Reuters.

Evading OnlyFans’ CSAM detection seems easy

OnlyFans told Reuters that “would-be creators must provide at least nine pieces of personally identifying information and documents, including bank details, a selfie while holding a government photo ID, and—in the United States—a Social Security number.”

“All this is verified by human judgment and age-estimation technology that analyzes the selfie,” OnlyFans told Reuters. On OnlyFans’ site, the platform further explained that “we continuously scan our platform to prevent the posting of CSAM. All our content moderators are trained to identify and swiftly report any suspected CSAM.”

However, Reuters found that none of these controls worked 100 percent of the time to stop bad actors from sharing CSAM. And the same seemingly holds true for some minors motivated to post their own explicit content. One girl told Reuters that she evaded age verification first by using an adult’s driver’s license to sign up, then by taking over an account of an adult user.

An OnlyFans spokesperson told Ars that low amounts of CSAM reported to NCMEC is a “testament to the rigorous safety controls OnlyFans has in place.”

“OnlyFans is proud of the work we do to aggressively target, report, and support the investigations and prosecutions of anyone who seeks to abuse our platform in this way,” OnlyFans’ spokesperson told Ars. “Unlike many other platforms, the lack of anonymity and absence of end-to-end encryption on OnlyFans means that reports are actionable by law enforcement and prosecutors.”

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Snapchat isn’t liable for connecting 12-year-old to convicted sex offenders

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Snapchat isn’t liable for connecting 12-year-old to convicted sex offenders

A judge has dismissed a complaint from a parent and guardian of a girl, now 15, who was sexually assaulted when she was 12 years old after Snapchat recommended that she connect with convicted sex offenders.

According to the court filing, the abuse that the girl, C.O., experienced on Snapchat happened soon after she signed up for the app in 2019. Through its “Quick Add” feature, Snapchat “directed her” to connect with “a registered sex offender using the profile name JASONMORGAN5660.” After a little more than a week on the app, C.O. was bombarded with inappropriate images and subjected to sextortion and threats before the adult user pressured her to meet up, then raped her. Cops arrested the adult user the next day, resulting in his incarceration, but his Snapchat account remained active for three years despite reports of harassment, the complaint alleged.

Two years later, at 14, C.O. connected with another convicted sex offender on Snapchat, a former police officer who offered to give C.O. a ride to school and then sexually assaulted her. The second offender is also currently incarcerated, the judge’s opinion noted.

The lawsuit painted a picture of Snapchat’s ongoing neglect of minors it knows are being targeted by sexual predators. Prior to C.O.’s attacks, both adult users sent and requested sexually explicit photos, seemingly without the app detecting any child sexual abuse materials exchanged on the platform. C.O. had previously reported other adult accounts sending her photos of male genitals, but Snapchat allegedly “did nothing to block these individuals from sending her inappropriate photographs.”

Among other complaints, C.O.’s lawsuit alleged that Snapchat’s algorithm for its “Quick Add” feature was the problem. It allegedly recklessly works to detect when adult accounts are seeking to connect with young girls and, by design, sends more young girls their way—continually directing sexual predators toward vulnerable targets. Snapchat is allegedly aware of these abuses and, therefore, should be held liable for harm caused to C.O., the lawsuit argued.

Although C.O.’s case raised difficult questions, Judge Barbara Bellis ultimately agreed with Snapchat that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act barred all claims and shielded Snap because “the allegations of this case fall squarely within the ambit of the immunity afforded to” platforms publishing third-party content.

According to Bellis, C.O.’s family had “clearly alleged” that Snap had failed to design its recommendations systems to block young girls from receiving messages from sexual predators. Specifically, Section 230 immunity shields Snap from liability in this case because Bellis considered the messages exchanged to be third-party content. Snapchat designing its recommendation systems to deliver content is a protected activity, Bellis ruled.

Internet law professor Eric Goldman wrote in his blog that Bellis’ “well-drafted and no-nonsense opinion” is “grounded” in precedent. Pointing to an “extremely similar” 2008 case against MySpace—”which reached the same outcome that Section 230 applies to offline sexual abuse following online messaging”—Goldman suggested that “the law has been quite consistent for a long time.”

However, as this case was being decided, a seemingly conflicting ruling in a Los Angeles court found that “Section 230 didn’t protect Snapchat from liability for allegedly connecting teens with drug dealers,” MediaPost noted. Bellis acknowledged this outlier opinion but did not appear to consider it persuasive.

Yet, at the end of her opinion, Bellis seemed to take aim at Section 230 as perhaps being too broad.

She quoted a ruling from the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which noted that some Section 230 cases, presumably like C.O.’s, are “hard” for courts not because “the legal issues defy resolution,” but because Section 230 requires that the court “deny relief to plaintiffs whose circumstances evoke outrage.” She then went on to quote an appellate court ruling on a similarly “difficult” Section 230 case that warned “without further legislative action,” there is “little” that courts can do “but join with other courts and commentators in expressing concern” with Section 230’s “broad scope.”

Ars could not immediately reach Snapchat or lawyers representing C.O.’s family for comment.

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Cops bogged down by flood of fake AI child sex images, report says

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“Particularly heinous” —

Investigations tied to harmful AI sex images will grow “exponentially,” experts say.

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Cops bogged down by flood of fake AI child sex images, report says

Law enforcement is continuing to warn that a “flood” of AI-generated fake child sex images is making it harder to investigate real crimes against abused children, The New York Times reported.

Last year, after researchers uncovered thousands of realistic but fake AI child sex images online, quickly every attorney general across the US called on Congress to set up a committee to squash the problem. But so far, Congress has moved slowly, while only a few states have specifically banned AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery. Meanwhile, law enforcement continues to struggle with figuring out how to confront bad actors found to be creating and sharing images that, for now, largely exist in a legal gray zone.

“Creating sexually explicit images of children through the use of artificial intelligence is a particularly heinous form of online exploitation,” Steve Grocki, the chief of the Justice Department’s child exploitation and obscenity section, told The Times. Experts told The Washington Post in 2023 that risks of realistic but fake images spreading included normalizing child sexual exploitation, luring more children into harm’s way, and making it harder for law enforcement to find actual children being harmed.

In one example, the FBI announced earlier this year that an American Airlines flight attendant, Estes Carter Thompson III, was arrested “for allegedly surreptitiously recording or attempting to record a minor female passenger using a lavatory aboard an aircraft.” A search of Thompson’s iCloud revealed “four additional instances” where Thompson allegedly recorded other minors in the lavatory, as well as “over 50 images of a 9-year-old unaccompanied minor” sleeping in her seat. While police attempted to identify these victims, they also “further alleged that hundreds of images of AI-generated child pornography” were found on Thompson’s phone.

The troubling case seems to illustrate how AI-generated child sex images can be linked to real criminal activity while also showing how police investigations could be bogged down by attempts to distinguish photos of real victims from AI images that could depict real or fake children.

Robin Richards, the commander of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Internet Crimes Against Children task force, confirmed to the NYT that due to AI, “investigations are way more challenging.”

And because image generators and AI models that can be trained on photos of children are widely available, “using AI to alter photos” of children online “is becoming more common,” Michael Bourke—a former chief psychologist for the US Marshals Service who spent decades supporting investigations into sex offenses involving children—told the NYT. Richards said that cops don’t know what to do when they find these AI-generated materials.

Currently, there aren’t many cases involving AI-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM), The NYT reported, but experts expect that number will “grow exponentially,” raising “novel and complex questions of whether existing federal and state laws are adequate to prosecute these crimes.”

Platforms struggle to monitor harmful AI images

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today grilling Big Tech CEOs over child sexual exploitation (CSE) on their platforms, Linda Yaccarino—CEO of X (formerly Twitter)—warned in her opening statement that artificial intelligence is also making it harder for platforms to monitor CSE. Yaccarino suggested that industry collaboration is imperative to get ahead of the growing problem, as is providing more resources to law enforcement.

However, US law enforcement officials have indicated that platforms are also making it harder to police CSAM and CSE online. Platforms relying on AI to detect CSAM are generating “unviable reports” gumming up investigations managed by already underfunded law enforcement teams, The Guardian reported. And the NYT reported that other investigations are being thwarted by adding end-to-end encryption options to messaging services, which “drastically limit the number of crimes the authorities are able to track.”

The NYT report noted that in 2002, the Supreme Court struck down a law that had been on the books since 1996 preventing “virtual” or “computer-generated child pornography.” South Carolina’s attorney general, Alan Wilson, has said that AI technology available today may test that ruling, especially if minors continue to be harmed by fake AI child sex images spreading online. In the meantime, federal laws such as obscenity statutes may be used to prosecute cases, the NYT reported.

Congress has recently re-introduced some legislation to directly address AI-generated non-consensual intimate images after a wide range of images depicting fake AI porn of pop star Taylor Swift went viral this month. That includes the Disrupt Explicit Forged Images and Non-Consensual Edits Act, which creates a federal civil remedy for any victims of any age who are identifiable in AI images depicting them as nude or engaged in sexually explicit conduct or sexual scenarios.

There’s also the “Preventing Deepfakes of Intimate Images Act,” which seeks to “prohibit the non-consensual disclosure of digitally altered intimate images.” That was re-introduced this year after teen boys generated AI fake nude images of female classmates and spread them around a New Jersey high school last fall. Francesca Mani, one of the teen victims in New Jersey, was there to help announce the proposed law, which includes penalties of up to two years imprisonment for sharing harmful images.

“What happened to me and my classmates was not cool, and there’s no way I’m just going to shrug and let it slide,” Mani said. “I’m here, standing up and shouting for change, fighting for laws, so no one else has to feel as lost and powerless as I did on October 20th.”

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