Source: Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) published on this website Thursday 19 September 2024 by Jill Powell
Sexual images of children sent to Huw Edwards could still spread on WhatsApp “today, tomorrow, and the next day” amid warnings Meta is failing to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material.
Edwards admitted having indecent imagery of children as young as seven, including Category A imagery, the most extreme category of child sexual abuse imagery in the UK which can include penetration, rape, sadism, or even bestiality.
The material was sent to Edwards via WhatsApp, an end-to-end encrypted messaging service, where even the company itself cannot see, let alone block, the criminal files being shared.
Now Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips has joined child protection charities and the National Crime Agency in calling on Meta to do more to stop images and videos of child sexual abuse from being shared on its platforms.
Meta, which owns WhatsApp, says current methods of detecting and blocking child sexual abuse imagery are incompatible with end-to-end encryption, which the company says it uses to help keep people, including children, safe.
Dan Sexton, Chief Technology Officer at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) said:
“I’d like to ask this question. How is Meta going to prevent this from happening again? What is stopping those images being shared again on that service today, tomorrow, and the next day?
“Right now, there is nothing stopping those exact images and videos of those children being shared on that platform, even though we know about it, and they know about it, and the police know about it. The mechanisms are not there. That’s what I’d like to see changed.
“We should not be seeing this in the news time and time again. It is a solvable problem.
“There are tried, trusted, and effective methods to detect images and videos of child sexual abuse and prevent them from being shared in the first place. But in WhatsApp, these safeguards are effectively switched off, with no alternative measures in place.
“This was a technology-enabled crime against children and I think this is where we need to see change.
“We must not forget they are at the heart of this scandal, and everyone, including big internet companies and platforms, owe it to those victims to make sure their imagery cannot spread even further. At the moment, Meta is choosing not to.”
