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Nobody collects these numbers. I sat with the chief counsel of NCMEC a while back and asked whether they even kept track of outcomes from the reports they forwa

Nobody collects these numbers. I sat with the chief counsel of NCMEC a while back and asked whether they even kept track of outcomes from the reports they forward to law enforcement, and they said they don't have the funds to keep stats on this. The best you can do is look at total number of reports and account shutdowns (which are increasing at a pretty surprising clip!) and try to puzzle out whether this represents the total failure of scanning, or if it's actually evidence that the problem is getting exponentially worse and therefore we need more scanning.

1827163 4y ago
I have heard rumors that the figures are often exaggerated, far in excess of what they really are... It was a long time ago, trying to find a source for this.... I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the bulk of the CSAM material is (supposedly consensual) sexting between teenagers. By the way I am scared to search Google for statistics on child pornography. Once I got a warning message from Google for a perfectly legal and reasonable search term regarding incidence rates of Japanese cartoon pornography. It absolutely chilled me to the bone when I saw that pop up, knowing well that my IP address was likely logged. My God, Orwell's 1984 nightmare, complete with thought crimes, but 39 years later. Welcome to the Police State. It's no longer fiction, but for real this time.
- 1827163 4y ago
  And when you hear me saying we have a "Police State" that is why. And it has crept up on us very slowly, that we didn't notice. What we have now is what some conspiracy theorists were talking about 20 years ago [1]. Especially the Snowden revelations on mass Internet surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ. 1. Note: I don't personally believe in conspiracy theories.
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  I believe it has been admitted that the bulk of it is sexting. They try to hush that sort of thing, up, though, because that would be admitting it's mostly a made-up issue. There's also the revenge-porn distributing of sexting. Wrong, but hardly child sexual abuse. If they're keeping track of what everyone is searching for I'm probably way up there on their watch lists--I've done a lot of suspicious looking searches fleshing out ideas for answers to the worldbuilding forum on StackOverflow. And I recall long ago a discussion where someone asserted snuff porn was widely available--probably broke a few meters in the monitoring HQ on that one. (No--found nothing that wasn't obviously fake and said so. I did find the very discussion thread on page 1, though.)
  - 1827163 4y ago
    Yes, it's pressure groups with political agendas at work there, trying to stoke the moral panic as much as they can. Known that for a long time indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
- ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
  Your first error was using Google as your search engine, at least for that.

1827163 4y ago

I have heard rumors that the figures are often exaggerated, far in excess of what they really are... It was a long time ago, trying to find a source for this.... I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the bulk of the CSAM material is (supposedly consensual) sexting between teenagers. By the way I am scared to search Google for statistics on child pornography. Once I got a warning message from Google for a perfectly legal and reasonable search term regarding incidence rates of Japanese cartoon pornography. It absolutely chilled me to the bone when I saw that pop up, knowing well that my IP address was likely logged. My God, Orwell's 1984 nightmare, complete with thought crimes, but 39 years later. Welcome to the Police State. It's no longer fiction, but for real this time.

1827163 4y ago
And when you hear me saying we have a "Police State" that is why. And it has crept up on us very slowly, that we didn't notice. What we have now is what some conspiracy theorists were talking about 20 years ago [1]. Especially the Snowden revelations on mass Internet surveillance by the NSA and GCHQ. 1. Note: I don't personally believe in conspiracy theories.
LorenPechtel 4y ago
I believe it has been admitted that the bulk of it is sexting. They try to hush that sort of thing, up, though, because that would be admitting it's mostly a made-up issue. There's also the revenge-porn distributing of sexting. Wrong, but hardly child sexual abuse. If they're keeping track of what everyone is searching for I'm probably way up there on their watch lists--I've done a lot of suspicious looking searches fleshing out ideas for answers to the worldbuilding forum on StackOverflow. And I recall long ago a discussion where someone asserted snuff porn was widely available--probably broke a few meters in the monitoring HQ on that one. (No--found nothing that wasn't obviously fake and said so. I did find the very discussion thread on page 1, though.)
- 1827163 4y ago
  Yes, it's pressure groups with political agendas at work there, trying to stoke the moral panic as much as they can. Known that for a long time indeed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur
ThePowerOfFuet 3y ago
Your first error was using Google as your search engine, at least for that.