Transparency Reporting on Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Online

This is the first OECD benchmarking report examining the policies and procedures related to child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) of the world’s top-50 global online content-sharing services. The report builds on three previous OECD benchmarking reports examining terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC), applying the methodology to another form of online abuse that is widely criminalized and recognized to be a serious societal challenge. As with the TVEC reports, this CSEA report provides an objective, factual snapshot in time of current practices, providing evidence that not only facilitates better understanding of the services’ relevant policies and procedures, but also of the extent and comparability of their transparency reporting. CSEA in this context – following the approach advocated by the WeProtect Global Alliance – refers to the sexual exploitation and abuse of children that is partly or entirely facilitated by technology. Online CSEA includes the production or dissemination of child sexual abuse material online, the livestreaming of child sexual abuse, and the use of technology to make contact with potential child victims online with the intention of sexual exploitation. CSEA can take place not just online but offline, in the physical world. However, the digital environment has become an enabling environment that makes it easier for offenders to produce, store and distribute child sexual abuse material and to connect with children to engage in exploitation through digital means. CSEA is an urgent and prominent policy challenge for which there have been several high-level calls to action. G7 Ministers have called attention to the devastating impact CSEA can have on victims and on societies and have called on digital service providers to prioritize protecting children, especially from illegal and harmful content and activity. The scale of the increase in reports of CSEA has been alarming. In 2022, the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received more than 31.8 million reports of CSEA around the world through its CyberTipline, an increase from 21.7 million reports in 2020. Each report is an instance of apparent CSEA comprising one or more unique pieces of content. While the increase is in part attributable to better detection methods, international agencies including INTERPOL have expressed concern that CSEA continues to expand in scale and severity, potentially overwhelming the ability of law enforcement to effectively respond. This report presents a baseline study of the policies, procedures and practices that the top-50 global online content-sharing services deploy in relation to CSEA on their platforms and services. The research is based on an analysis of the publicly available policies and other governance materials, including transparency reports (TRs), issued by the services. Following the methodology established for the benchmarking of TVEC policies, this report includes profiles for each service that summarize whether and how CSEA is defined in the relevant terms of service (ToS) or other standards, the service’s policies on detection and removal of CSEA, its content moderation methods, the availability of notification and appeals procedures, the issuance of TRs and evidence of the extent to which the service has been exploited for CSEA purposes