Time: As Tech CEOs Are Grilled Over Child Safety Online, AI Is Complicating the Issue

The CEOs of five social media companies including Meta, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) were grilled by Senators on Wednesday about how they are preventing online child sexual exploitation.The Senate Judiciary Committee called the meeting to hold the CEOs to account for what they said was a failure to prevent the abuse of minors, and ask whether they would support the laws that members of the Committee had proposed to address the problem.

It is an issue that is getting worse, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which says reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reached a record high last year of more than 36 million, as reported by the Washington Post. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline, a centralized system in the U.S. for reporting online CSAM, was alerted to more than 88 million files in 2022, with almost 90% of reports coming from outside the country.Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Shou Chew of TikTok, and Linda Yaccarino of X appeared alongside Jason Spiegel of Snap and Jason Citron of Discord to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee. While Zuckerberg and Chew appeared voluntarily, the Committee had to serve Spiegel, Citron, and Yaccarino subpoenas.

Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois and the Committee chair, opened the hearing with a video showing victims of online child sexual exploitation, including families of children who had died by suicide after being targeted by predators online. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina and the ranking member, told attendees about Gavin Guffey, the 17-year-old son of South Carolina state house Rep. Brandon Guffey, who died by suicide last after he was sexually extorted on Instagram. “You have blood on your hands,” Graham told the CEOs, singling out Zuckerberg in particular.

Many of the assembled lawmakers expressed their frustration with what they said were insufficient efforts taken by the social media companies to tackle the problem and affirmed their own eagerness to act. In the past year, in addition to holding a number of hearings, the Judiciary Committee has reported a number of bills aimed at protecting children online onto the Senate floor, including the EARN IT Act, which would remove tech companies’ immunity from civil and criminal liability under child sexual abuse material laws. In their testimonies, the CEOs all laid out the measures they were taking to prevent online harms against children. However, when pressed on whether they would support the bills reported by the Judiciary Committee, many demurred.

At one point, Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, asked Zuckerberg whether he would like to apologize to the parents of children affected by online CSAM that were present at the hearing. "I’m sorry for everything you’ve all gone through," Zuckerberg said. "It’s terrible. No one should have to go through the things that your families have suffered."

On multiple occasions, the CEOs highlighted their companies’ use of artificial intelligence to address the issue of online CSAM. In his testimony, Citron highlighted Discord’s acquisition of Sentropy, a company that developed AI-based content moderation solutions. Zuckerberg said that 99% of content Meta removes is automatically detected AI tools. However, the lawmakers and tech bosses did not discuss the role that AI is having in the proliferation of CSAM.

AI-generated child abuse imagesThe advent of generative artificial intelligence is adding to concerns about harms to children online. Law enforcers around the world have been scrambling to deal with an onslaught of cases involving AI-generated child sexual abuse material—an unprecedented phenomenon before many courts. On Jan. 10, 17-year-old Marvel actress Xochitl Gomez, who portrayed teen superhero America Chavez in the 2022 film Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, spoke about  how difficult it was to scrub X of AI-generated pornographic images of her.Speaking on a podcast with actor Taylor Lautner and his wife on, Gomez said her mother and her team have been trying—without success—to get the images taken down. “She had emails upon emails, but like, there's been a lot and she's dealt with it all,” she says. “For me, it wasn't like something that was mind boggling, but just more like, ‘Why is it so hard to take down?’”

Authorities are faced with the complicated task of stopping the spread of AI-generated CSAM as the technology evolves at a rapid pace and the ease of access to tools such as so-called nudify apps increases, even among children themselves.

As AI models improve and become more accessible, they will also become harder to police should they be used for illegal purposes, like creating CSAM, according to Dan Sexton, the chief technology officer of the U.K.-based Internet Watch Foundation (IWF). He says the world needs to agree on a solution fast: “The longer we wait to come up with a solution for each of these potential issues that might happen tomorrow, the greatest chance is that it will have already happened and then we are chasing behind, and you're trying to undo harms that already happened.”