Technology companies are already under immense pressure to reduce the spread of misinformation related to COVID-19 on their platforms with fewer workers available to review content because many contractors have been sent home and cannot access the company's systems remotely because of security measures. NBC News did not click on the links, but it reported the accounts, and YouTube removed them.
A listings page for YouTube accounts ostensibly about chicken soup recipes that were being used to promote links to download child sexual exploitation material. NBC News did not click on the links to verify that they contained what they advertised. Others referred to the names of children who appear in sets of child abuse imagery already known to law enforcement.
Sometimes they used generic terms with the initials "C.P.," a common abbreviation for "child pornography," and code like "caldo de pollo," which means "chicken soup" in Spanish. Many of the links were to groups on private messaging apps, including Telegram and WhatsApp, as well as to file-sharing sites such as Mega.
They then drive interested consumers to more private channels where they can access the material, often using encrypted messaging apps or poorly policed file-sharing services.ĭownload the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreakĬoncerned parents notified NBC News of accounts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and in the comments of YouTube videos where users were sharing and asking for links to child abuse images and videos. They frequently use the most popular platforms to find a community of child sexual predators to whom they can advertise the material using coded language. The COVID-19 pandemic means people are spending more time online at home, leading to greater demand for this type of content.ĭistributors and consumers of the material have developed elaborate, cross-platform strategies to dodge detection.
The incident came at a time when popular social media, video and messaging platforms have been flooded with child sexual exploitation material, experts told NBC News. Oghia's meeting did not require a password.
Zoom also now defaults to password protection for all meetings. The company said that it uses a mix of tools, including automated ones, to proactively identify accounts that could be sharing child sexual exploitation material and that it notifies law enforcement when appropriate. Zoom said that it was looking into what happened on Oghia's call and that any child abuse on its platform is "devastating and appalling" and prohibited by its policies. A significant chunk of the new reports are made up of a small number of videos that went viral, according to John Shehan, vice president of the center's exploited children division. Reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the organization that receives cybertips in the United States, including from all of the Silicon Valley technology platforms, have more than doubled, from 983,734 reports in March 2019 to 2,027,520 reports this March. At the same time, reports of child sexual exploitation activity to cybertip hotlines are up by an average of 30 percent globally, according to InHope, a network of 47 national cybertip lines. Distributors of child sexual abuse images are trading links to material in plain sight on platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram using coded language to evade the companies' detection tools, according to child safety experts and law enforcement.