How we can eliminate child sexual abuse material from the internet

Social entrepreneur Julie Cordua works on a problem that isn't easy to talk about: the sexual abuse of children in images and videos on the internet. At Thorn, she's building technology to connect the dots between the tech industry, law enforcement and government -- so we can swiftly end the viral distribution of abuse material and rescue children faster. Learn more about how this scalable solution could help dismantle the communities normalizing child sexual abuse around the world today. (This ambitious plan is part of the Audacious Project, TED's initiative to inspire and fund global change.)

[This talk contains mature content]

Five years ago,

I received a phone call
that would change my life.

I remember so vividly that day.

It was about this time of year,

and I was sitting in my office.

I remember the sun
streaming through the window.

And my phone rang.

And I picked it up,

and it was two federal agents,
asking for my help

in identifying a little girl

featured in hundreds of child
sexual abuse images they had found online.

They had just started working the case,

but what they knew

was that her abuse had been broadcast
to the world for years

on dark web sites dedicated
to the sexual abuse of children.

And her abuser was incredibly
technologically sophisticated:

new images and new videos every few weeks,

but very few clues as to who she was

or where she was.

And so they called us,

because they had heard
we were a new nonprofit

building technology
to fight child sexual abuse.

But we were only two years old,

and we had only worked
on child sex trafficking.

And I had to tell them

we had nothing.

We had nothing that could
help them stop this abuse.

It took those agents another year

to ultimately find that child.

And by the time she was rescued,

hundreds of images and videos
documenting her rape had gone viral,

from the dark web

to peer-to-peer networks,
private chat rooms

and to the websites you and I use

every single day.

And today, as she struggles to recover,

she lives with the fact
that thousands around the world

continue to watch her abuse.

I have come to learn
in the last five years

that this case is far from unique.

How did we get here as a society?

In the late 1980s, child pornography --

or what it actually is,
child sexual abuse material --

was nearly eliminated.

New laws and increased prosecutions
made it simply too risky

to trade it through the mail.

And then came the internet,
and the market exploded.

The amount of content in circulation today

is massive and growing.

This is a truly global problem,

but if we just look at the US:

in the US alone last year,

more than 45 million images and videos
of child sexual abuse material

were reported to the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children,

and that is nearly double
the amount the year prior.

And the details behind these numbers
are hard to contemplate,

with more than 60 percent of the images
featuring children younger than 12,

and most of them including
extreme acts of sexual violence.

Abusers are cheered on in chat rooms
dedicated to the abuse of children,

where they gain rank and notoriety

with more abuse and more victims.

In this market,

the currency has become
the content itself.

It's clear that abusers have been quick
to leverage new technologies,

but our response as a society has not.

These abusers don't read
user agreements of websites,

and the content doesn't honor
geographic boundaries.

And they win when we look
at one piece of the puzzle at a time,

which is exactly how
our response today is designed.

Law enforcement works in one jurisdiction.

Companies look at just their platform.

And whatever data they learn along the way

is rarely shared.

It is so clear that this
disconnected approach is not working.

We have to redesign
our response to this epidemic

for the digital age.

And that's exactly
what we're doing at Thorn.

We're building the technology
to connect these dots,

to arm everyone on the front lines --

law enforcement, NGOs and companies --

with the tools they need
to ultimately eliminate

child sexual abuse material
from the internet.

Let's talk for a minute --

(Applause)

Thank you.

(Applause)

Let's talk for a minute
about what those dots are.

As you can imagine,
this content is horrific.

If you don't have to look at it,
you don't want to look at it.

And so, most companies
or law enforcement agencies

that have this content

can translate every file
into a unique string of numbers.

This is called a "hash."

It's essentially a fingerprint

for each file or each video.

And what this allows them to do
is use the information in investigations

or for a company to remove
the content from their platform,

without having to relook
at every image and every video each time.

The problem today, though,

is that there are hundreds
of millions of these hashes

sitting in siloed databases
all around the world.

In a silo,

it might work for the one agency
that has control over it,

but not connecting this data means
we don't know how many are unique.

We don't know which ones represent
children who have already been rescued

or need to be identified still.

So our first, most basic premise
is that all of this data

must be connected.

There are two ways where this data,
combined with software on a global scale,

can have transformative
impact in this space.

The first is with law enforcement:

helping them identify new victims faster,

stopping abuse

and stopping those producing this content.

The second is with companies:

using it as clues to identify
the hundreds of millions of files

in circulation today,

pulling it down

and then stopping the upload
of new material before it ever goes viral.

Four years ago,

when that case ended,

our team sat there,
and we just felt this, um ...

... deep sense of failure,
is the way I can put it,

because we watched that whole year

while they looked for her.

And we saw every place
in the investigation

where, if the technology
would have existed,

they would have found her faster.

And so we walked away from that

and we went and we did
the only thing we knew how to do:

we began to build software.

So we've started with law enforcement.

Our dream was an alarm bell on the desks
of officers all around the world

so that if anyone dare post
a new victim online,

someone would start
looking for them immediately.

I obviously can't talk about
the details of that software,

but today it's at work in 38 countries,

having reduced the time it takes
to get to a child

by more than 65 percent.

(Applause)

And now we're embarking
on that second horizon:

building the software to help companies
identify and remove this content.

Let's talk for a minute
about these companies.

So, I told you -- 45 million images
and videos in the US alone last year.

Those come from just 12 companies.

Twelve companies, 45 million files
of child sexual abuse material.

These come from those companies
that have the money

to build the infrastructure that it takes
to pull this content down.

But there are hundreds of other companies,

small- to medium-size companies
around the world,

that need to do this work,

but they either: 1) can't imagine that
their platform would be used for abuse,

or 2) don't have the money to spend
on something that is not driving revenue.

So we went ahead and built it for them,

and this system now gets smarter
with the more companies that participate.

Let me give you an example.

Our first partner, Imgur --
if you haven't heard of this company,

it's one of the most visited
websites in the US --

millions of pieces of user-generated
content uploaded every single day,

in a mission to make the internet
a more fun place.

They partnered with us first.

Within 20 minutes
of going live on our system,

someone tried to upload
a known piece of abuse material.

They were able to stop it,
they pull it down,

they report it to the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children.

But they went a step further,

and they went and inspected the account
of the person who had uploaded it.

Hundreds more pieces
of child sexual abuse material

that we had never seen.

And this is where we start
to see exponential impact.

We pull that material down,

it gets reported to the National Center
for Missing and Exploited Children

and then those hashes
go back into the system

and benefit every other company on it.

And when the millions of hashes we have
lead to millions more and, in real time,

companies around the world are identifying
and pulling this content down,

we will have dramatically increased
the speed at which we are removing

child sexual abuse material
from the internet around the world.

(Applause)

But this is why it can't just be
about software and data,

it has to be about scale.

We have to activate thousands of officers,

hundreds of companies around the world

if technology will allow us
to outrun the perpetrators

and dismantle the communities
that are normalizing child sexual abuse

around the world today.

And the time to do this is now.

We can no longer say we don't know
the impact this is having on our children.

The first generation of children
whose abuse has gone viral

are now young adults.

The Canadian Centre for Child Protection

just did a recent study
of these young adults

to understand the unique trauma
they try to recover from,

knowing that their abuse lives on.

Eighty percent of these young adults
have thought about suicide.

More than 60 percent
have attempted suicide.

And most of them live
with the fear every single day

that as they walk down the street
or they interview for a job

or they go to school

or they meet someone online,

that that person has seen their abuse.

And the reality came true
for more than 30 percent of them.

They had been recognized
from their abuse material online.

This is not going to be easy,

but it is not impossible.

Now it's going to take the will,

the will of our society

to look at something
that is really hard to look at,

to take something out of the darkness

so these kids have a voice;

the will of companies to take action
and make sure that their platforms

are not complicit in the abuse of a child;

the will of governments to invest
with their law enforcement

for the tools they need to investigate
a digital first crime,

even when the victims
cannot speak for themselves.

This audacious commitment
is part of that will.

It's a declaration of war
against one of humanity's darkest evils.

But what I hang on to

is that it's actually
an investment in a future

where every child can simply be a kid.

Thank you.

(Applause)