Internet giants, including Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft, among others, cannot effectively delete large amounts of data with abusive content found in search engines, social networks, and cloud storage, The New York Times stated Sunday.
The US-based newspaper conducted an investigation into the issue and discovered that online abusive content is growing and can remain undetected. What is more, according to the report, is that parents and guardians representing those children are blocked from getting photos and videos of their abuse taken down.
As a striking example, the media outlet introduced the horrific story of two sisters who wished to remain anonymous.
Their father - now in prison - recorded abusing them and posted the material online but they still live in fear long after he went to jail, as footage of their abuse was found in over 130 previous child sexual abuse investigations, The New York Times said.
“That’s in my head all the time — knowing those pictures are out there [...] Because of the way the internet works, that’s not something that’s going to go away”, one of the sisters said, cited by The New York Times.
American journalists used software developed specifically for their research in an investigation that rigorously combed online search engines with at least three dozen terms related to child sexual abuse. According to the media report, obscene content found by the automated script was reported to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, before being flagged to Microsoft.
The Canadian Centre for Child Protection said, cited by The New York Times, one of the images found showed a naked girl of about 13 on her back laying “in an extreme manner”. The Canadian centre said later the authorities had already removed the girl from danger.
Microsoft reportedly responded that it "uncovered a flaw in its scanning practices", and would re-examine its process. A spokesperson for Microsoft attributed the nature of the problem to being a "moving target", according to the media outlet.
According to the New York Times, US prosecutors announced last month that they had dismantled what they claimed to be the world's "largest dark web child porn marketplace" which reportedly featured more than 200,000 videos showing sexual abuse of children. The site reportedly ran on the dark web.
