Part 2 The dark web: A hidden marketplace for child abuse

We can give you more general information, but I think that it may be helpful for you to reach out to a lawyer to discuss your specific questions. The Financial Times recently called it “the hottest social media platform in the world”. The newspaper reported that OnlyFans’ revenue grew by 553% in the year to November 2020, and users spent £1.7bn on the site. Children using the site who contacted the service reported being child porn victims of prior sexual abuse, while others presented “mental health issues including anger, low self-esteem, self-harm and suicide ideation”.

Children can be legally charged for criminal sexual conduct.

• If you find what you believe to be sexual images of children on the internet, report this immediately to authorities by contacting Cybertipline.
• The law also bans the act of providing child porn to many or unspecified individuals, or displaying it in public, on websites or by other means.
• Other measures allow people to take control even if they can’t tell anybody about their worries — if the original images or videos still remain in device they hold, such as a phone, computer or tablet.
• “The world of crime is modernizing itself, much more quickly on the Internet,” she underlined.

Top technology companies, including Google, OpenAI and Stability AI, have agreed to work with anti-child sexual abuse organization Thorn to combat the spread of child sexual abuse images. The court’s decisions in Ferber and Ashcroft could be used to argue that any AI-generated sexually explicit image of real minors should not be protected as free speech given the psychological harms inflicted on the real minors. The court’s ruling in Ashcroft may permit AI-generated sexually explicit images of fake minors. The city of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was shaken by revelations in December 2023 that two local teenage boys shared hundreds of nude images of girls in their community over a private chat on the social chat platform Discord. Witnesses said the photos easily could have been mistaken for real ones, but they were fake.

DOH: 596 Pinoys get HIV due to paid sex

Hertfordshire Police told us that a 14-year-old girl had managed to use her grandmother’s passport and bank details to sell explicit images. Leah’s age was directly reported to OnlyFans by an anonymous social media account in late January. The company says this led to a moderator reviewing the account and double-checking her ID. She told her mum she originally intended to only post pictures of her feet after making money selling them on Snapchat. But this soon escalated to explicit videos of her masturbating and playing with sex toys. But BBC News has also heard from child protection experts across the UK and US, spoken to dozens of police forces and schools, and obtained anonymised extracts from Childline counsellor notes, about underage experiences on OnlyFans.

BBC News has found that creators can share content and then arrange payments through alternative providers, in violation of company guidelines. One of the most popular is Cash App, which allows users to transfer money by mobile phone. But images from her account have already been leaked all across the internet. Leah, 17, was able to set up an account using a fake driving licence and sell explicit videos. OnlyFans was a big winner during the pandemic, exploding in popularity as much of the world was housebound.

Each time a media outlet uses one of these phrases it reinforces a perception that child sexual abuse can be consensual. It also, in turn, helps to diminish the crime and perpetuate the abuse by mutualising the experience of both the perpetrator and the victim involved. Perhaps the most important part of the Ashcroft decision for emerging issues around AI-generated child sexual abuse material was part of the statute that the Supreme Court did not strike down. That provision of the law prohibited “more common and lower tech means of creating virtual (child sexual abuse material), known as computer morphing,” which involves taking pictures of real minors and morphing them into sexually explicit depictions. Learning that someone you know has been viewing child sexual abuse material (child pornography) must have been very shocking, and it’s normal to feel angry, disgusted, scared, or confused – or all of these things at once.

By category among teen offenders, 40.2 percent of the violations were secretly taking pictures and video or persuading victims to send nudes. That was followed closely by violations for posting such content online, at 39.6 percent. Researcher Jessica Taylor Piotrowski, a professor at the University of Amsterdam, said that, nowadays, measures such as age restriction alone have not been effective. This issue was also raised by researcher Veriety McIntosh, an expert in virtual reality. In her presentation, Taylor Piotrowski pointed out that the internet today has a higher degree of complexity and that there are resources that children still do not fully understand. Prosecutor Priscila Costa Schreiner of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office cybercrime unit said that in addition to the increase in reports, there has also been an evolution in the tools used by criminals.