With the contemporary developments of technology and social media, online sexual exploitation of children has become considerably worse, with social media companies doing little to aid in preventing it. This fact was acknowledged during a meeting on Jan. 31, 2024, with the U.S. Senate and the CEOs of major social media companies: Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Meta and X, formerly Twitter.
American families attended the meeting and held up pictures of their children who had been harmed due to social media exploitation. Parents came to advocate for the livelihood of children and allowed for the meeting to delve into the devastation social media has brought upon the people of America.
Minnesota Democrat Senator, Amy Klobuchar, mentioned how since the dawn of social media 28 years ago, the exploitation of children and other crimes have been prevalent online. Many bills have been proposed but none passed due to the underhanded means by which big companies operate. With crimes increasing in frequency, however, Klobuchar and the rest of the senate believe that enough is enough. It is time to restrict social media corporations to make sure they operate safely.
Throughout the years, children have been increasingly exposed to social media. In a 2021 report, National Center for Missing & Exploited children reported it received 29.3 million reports of suspected online child abuse, a whopping 35% higher than the year before. This is likely due to the increased online usage post-quarantine as most children were trapped in their room with no real sources of entertainment besides their screens.
Increased social media usage, however, has only spurned predators to act. With more children willing to form online relationships with poor online security, predators have continued to prosper. Services like Discord are particularly susceptible to exploitation, as it allows for anonymity for all users, contains private servers and direct messaging to other users. Discord admittedly had taken measures to combat exploitation with content reporters and moderation tools, but they have proven incredibly ineffective, especially when knowing perpetrators can simply create new accounts with different pseudonyms.
The dynamic nature of Discord and other online platforms makes it so constant adjustments to emerging threats are necessary to maintain any security. The adjustments have been difficult to acquire as they require constant effort and money from the company’s part, but with how easily they have been skiving under the policing radar of the government, they have not had the need to make sure they are made.
Thanks to the greed and corruption of social media companies, exploitative online behavior has been pseudo-normalized for children. The Wall Street Journal reported they conducted an experiment by making a TikTok account posing as a 13-year-old boy. With the account, the WSJ was able to find videos that advertised pornography and prostitution despite the fact they go against TikTok’s guidelines. By actively distributing inappropriate content to children, TikTok serves to normalize them and creates a platform allowing children to actively explore them.
Early exposure to sexual material is proven to have detrimental effects on children. Psychology Today reported that children who viewed sexual material during adolescence are at an increased risk of engaging in dangerous sexual activity by the age of 13, including engaging with multiple partners, not using protection and abusing substances before sexual activity. These children put themselves at risk of disease and disorder thanks to the internet, forming unhealthy relationships with sex and making uninformed decisions.
Hopefully, child exploitation has reached its climax, with governments finally intervening on behalf of the children. While specifics are not currently on display, during the U.S. senate meeting, government officials made sure to make their stance abundantly clear, spending over five hours drilling social media CEOs about every security concern they had and harshly criticizing their underwhelming policies. The government has begun to prioritize child online safety over upholding immoral social media companies and in doing so is on the way to paving a path that will ensure the safety of American youth. It is about time.