On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed the REPORT Act, and social media platform X announced that it’s already expanding its “aggressive” enforcement to curtail the sexual exploitation of children on the internet.
The Revising Existing Procedures on Reporting via Technology (REPORT) Act, which is a rare bipartisan effort, was written by Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.). The new law extends the list of crimes social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram and X must report to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline. Previous law only required these companies to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), but now, they’re also mandated to report crimes against children involving sex trafficking, grooming, or the enticement of children for sexual acts.
The REPORT Act also raises the penalties for companies that fail to report exploitative content, with fines ranging from $150,000 to $1 million depending on the infraction and the size of the company.
In a recents statement, X CEO Linda Yaccarino said, “X applauds Senator Blackburn’s leadership in combating the exploitation of children, strengthening critical partners like NCMEC, and helping law enforcement bring criminals to justice.”
X, formerly Twitter, said Tuesday that it is a participant in the beta of the Safer Predict Child Sexual Abuse text classifier developed by Thorn, the nonprofit anti-trafficking organization founded by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. The new tool is designed to “detect sextortion patterns and other exploitative behavior and content.”
The company is also participating in Tech Coalition’s Project Lantern, sharing data with other participating companies to identify cross-platform bad actors, who employ multiple services to traffic child sexual exploitation (CSE) content.
The social media platform is also augmenting its ability for human content moderation, “steadily building” its X Support Center in Austin, Texas, and training more agents.
In the first quarter of 2024, X announced that it had already submitted approximately 175,000 reports to NCMEC’s CyberTipline, and suspended 1.5 million accounts for prohibited material or behaviors including CSE content, grooming, blackmail, and identifying purported victims of CSE.
“Children are increasingly looking at screens, and the reality is that this leaves more innocent kids at risk of online exploitation,” Senator Blackburn explained in a statement. “Under this new law, Big Tech will now be required to report trafficking, grooming or enticement of children found on their sites to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline.”
The NCMEC’s CyberTipline is a centralized system that receives reports of child exploitation from across the country, making them accessible to relevant law enforcement agencies. The new law also extends the amount of time the CyberTipline is allowed to preserve reported evidence to one year. The previous time limit was just 90 days. And, for the first time, victims and their parents are allowed to report abuse directly to the NCMEC due to the new law.
“My bipartisan law with Senator Blackburn will ensure tech companies are held accountable to report and remove child sex abuse material and to strengthen protection for kids online,” said Senator Ossoff. “At a time of such division in Congress, we successfully brought Republicans and Democrats together to protect kids on the internet, and now our bill is law.”
TMX contributed to this story.
