Facebook Apps Used in More Than Half of Online Child Sex Crimes, Analysis Finds

Editor

March 26, 2021

More than half of online child sex crimes are committed using Facebook-owned apps, according to a new analysis from the U.K.-based charity National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.

Data from the NSPCC showed law enforcement in the U.K. recorded 9,477 instances of sexual or illicit image offenses against children between October 2019 and September 2020. Fifty-two percent of those communications took place on Facebook-owned apps, The Independent reported.

The agency openly opposes Facebook’s plan to make messaging across all their apps — not just in WhatsApp — encrypted in order to protect user privacy. The NSPCC has argued doing so would open the door for all kinds of abuses that will then be much more difficult to identify and track.

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“Facebook is willingly turning back the clock on children’s safety by pushing ahead with end-to-end encryption despite repeated warnings that their apps will facilitate more serious abuse more often,” explained Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy for the NSPCC.

In February, an official with the National Crime Agency said the encryption plan “poses an existential threat to child protection,” according to ITV News.

Rob Jones, director of threat leadership at the NCA, said end-to-end encryption “effectively locks them [Facebook] out of their own network and locks them out of their own product and the material that’s on that network.”

“What it creates is a private space where people … can masquerade as children, engage with children, groom them, and potentially develop either coercive control of that individual and get them to abuse themselves and send images to them, or to meet them in the real world and abuse them directly themselves,” Jones said, adding the threat of abuse will only escalate “as children are more reliant upon [the internet].”

In response to the data from the NSPCC, a spokesperson for Facebook told The Independent that “child exploitation has no place on our platforms and we will continue to lead the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect, and respond to abuse.”

“For example, last week, we announced new safety features on Instagram, including preventing adults from messaging under 18s who don’t follow them,” the spokesperson said. “End-to-end encryption is already the leading security technology used by many services to keep people, including children, safe from having their private information hacked and stolen. Its full rollout on our messaging services is a long-term project and we are building strong safety measures into our plans.”

The numbers from the NSPCC comes a couple months after it was revealed Facebook’s platforms played an outsized role in providing spaces for radicals to organize ahead of the Jan. 6 riot inside the U.S. Capitol.

Parler, the pro-free speech alternative to Twitter, was deplatformed by Apple, Google, and Amazon in January over claims the site was responsible for a great deal of the organizing for the rioting. The left-leaning site Salon, though, reported that the role Parler played “ pales in comparison to social media behemoths like Facebook.”

“If you took Parler out of the equation, you would still almost certainly have what happened at the Capitol,” said Angelo Carusone, president of the leftist Media Matters. “If you took Facebook out of the equation before that, you would not. To me, when Apple and Google sent their letter to Parler, I was a little bit confused why Facebook didn’t get one.”

Faithwire sent a request for comment on the NSPCC data to Facebook’s press office. If a representative for the platform responds to our inquiry, this story will be updated to include those remarks.

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