CSAM Prevention Struggles Persist: New Research Promising

Combating the sharing of Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) is a persistent challenge for social media platforms. Platforms should have a moral obligation to protect victims, but often  struggle to manage this duty: moderating CSAM content takes a toll on the people charged with stopping it and those who distribute it are often very practised at evading interception. CSAM also puts social media operators in legal jeopardy, which for small operators may be existential.

Rather than requiring every social media operator to reinvent CSAM prevention from scratch, an interoperable protocol makes it easier for platforms to pool resources to combat a shared problem. We are already working on a common infrastructure for precisely this purpose.

The headline reflects the fact that even with a better, shared system, some challenges will remain, but hints at the fact that shared, open research is our best bet to tackle them.