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#18978492 at 2023-06-09 18:50:23 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #23301: Slippery Slope Of Indictments Edition

'Zuckerberg Must Explain': EU Demands Answers On 'Instagram Pedophile Network'

The European Union's senior commissioner on internal markets has demanded answers from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg over a report in the Wall Street Journal about Instagram's facilitation of child pornography networks.

Thierry Breton, the EU's Internal Market Commissioner, said in a Thursday tweet that "#Meta's voluntary code on child protection seems not to work," adding "Mark Zuckerberg must now explain & take immediate action."

Breton will fly to Meta's headquarters in Menlo Park in two weeks to discuss with Zuckerberg.

According to the tweet, Meta will have to demonstrate that they've adequately addressed the child porn issue, or 'face heavy sanctions.'

According to the report in the Journal, which Meta did not deny, Instagram has become home to a large and organized network of pedophiles - for whom Instagram's own algorithms promoted kiddie-porn. The pedophiles themselves were using

coded emojis, such as a picture of a map, or a slice of cheese pizza.

Instagram connects pedophiles and guides them to content sellers via recommendation systems that excel at linking those who share niche interests, the Journal and the academic researchers found.

…

The pedophilic accounts on Instagram mix brazenness with superficial efforts to veil their activity, researchers found. Certain emojis function as a kind of code, such as an image of a map-shorthand for "minor-attracted person"-or one of "cheese pizza," which shares its initials with "child pornography," according to Levine of UMass. Many declare themselves "lovers of the little things in life." -WSJ

According to the researchers, Instagram allowed pedophiles to search for content with explicit hashtags such as #pedowhore and #preteensex, which were then used to connect them to accounts that advertise child-sex material for sale from users going under names such as "little slut for you."

"Instagram is an on ramp to places on the internet where there's more explicit child sexual abuse," according to Brian Levine, director of the UMass Rescue Lab. Levine authored a 2022 report for the DOJ's National Institute of Justice on child exploitation over the internet.

What's more, Meta accounted for 85% of child pornography reports filed with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, according to the report. That said, "Meta has struggled with these efforts more than other platforms both because of weak enforcement and design features that promote content discovery of legal as well as illicit material, Stanford found."

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/zuckerberg-must-explain-eu-demands-answers-instagram-pedophile-network

#18966827 at 2023-06-07 16:06:50 (UTC+1)
Q Research General #23286: Canadian Smoke On The Water Edition

>>18966825
Test accounts set up by researchers that viewed a single account in the network were immediately hit with "suggested for you" recommendations of purported child-sex-content sellers and buyers, as well as accounts linking to off-platform content trading sites. Following just a handful of these recommendations was enough to flood a test account with content that sexualizes children.

The Stanford Internet Observatory used hashtags associated with underage sex to find 405 sellers of what researchers labeled "self-generated" child-sex material-or accounts purportedly run by children themselves, some saying they were as young as 12. According to data gathered via Maltego, a network mapping software, 112 of those seller accounts collectively had 22,000 unique followers.

Underage-sex-content creators and buyers are just a corner of a larger ecosystem devoted to sexualized child content. Other accounts in the pedophile community on Instagram aggregate pro-pedophilia memes, or discuss their access to children. Current and former Meta employees who have worked on Instagram child-safety initiatives estimate the number of accounts that exist primarily to follow such content is in the high hundreds of thousands, if not millions.

A Meta spokesman said the company actively seeks to remove such users, taking down 490,000 accounts for violating its child safety policies in January alone.

"Instagram is an on ramp to places on the internet where there's more explicit child sexual abuse," said Brian Levine, director of the UMass Rescue Lab, which researches online child victimization and builds forensic tools to combat it. Levine is an author of a 2022 report for the National Institute of Justice, the Justice Department's research arm, on internet child exploitation.

Instagram, estimated to have more than 1.3 billion users, is especially popular with teens. The Stanford researchers found some similar sexually exploitative activity on other, smaller social platforms, but said they found that the problem on Instagram is particularly severe. "The most important platform for these networks of buyers and sellers seems to be Instagram," they wrote in a report slated for release on June 7.

Instagram said that its internal statistics show that users see child exploitation in less than one in 10 thousand posts viewed.

The effort by social-media platforms and law enforcement to fight the spread of child pornography online centers largely on hunting for confirmed images and videos, known as child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, which already are known to be in circulation. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, a U.S. nonprofit organization that works with law enforcement, maintains a database of digital fingerprints for such images and videos and a platform for sharing such data among internet companies.

Internet company algorithms check the digital fingerprints of images posted on their platforms against that list, and report back to the center when they detect them, as U.S. federal law requires. In 2022, the center received 31.9 million reports of child pornography, mostly from internet companies-up 47% from two years earlier.

Meta, with more than 3 billion users across its apps, which include Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp, is able to detect these types of known images if they aren't encrypted. Meta accounted for 85% of the child pornography reports filed to the center, including some 5 million from Instagram.

Meta's automated screening for existing child exploitation content can't detect new images or efforts to advertise their sale. Preventing and detecting such activity requires not just reviewing user reports but tracking and disrupting pedophile networks, say current and former staffers as well as the Stanford researchers. The goal is to make it difficult for such users to connect with each other, find content and recruit victims.

Such work is vital because law-enforcement agencies lack the resources to investigate more than a tiny fraction of the tips NCMEC receives, said Levine of UMass. That means the platforms have primary responsibility to prevent a community from forming and normalizing child sexual abuse.

Meta has struggled with these efforts more than other platforms both because of weak enforcement and design features that promote content discovery of legal as well as illicit material, Stanford found.

The Stanford team found 128 accounts offering to sell child-sex-abuse material on Twitter, less than a third the number they found on Instagram, which has a far larger overall user base than Twitter. Twitter didn't recommend such accounts to the same degree as Instagram, and it took them down far more quickly, the team found.