How Likely Is It That I’m Seeing Actual Kids When I Watch “Barely Legal” Videos Online?

How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. BuzzFeed recently published a story about questionable material showing up on TikTok in India, and I’ve read stories about Snapchat being used to exchange child sex abuse material as well. He said attempts to upload illegal content on xHamster are rare: “We only see about one attempt to upload illegal content in every 20,000 videos.” “If anything, we’re overly cautious,” he added. As Daphne Young, chief communications officer of the child abuse prevention nonprofit Childhelp, told me, “You’ve broached on a really difficult topic because there is a culture of pornography trafficking in an underage aesthetic that seeks to conceal itself with obfuscating language.” She said that when she was part of a child welfare think tank, the technology for flagging child sexual abuse material was impressive, but “widespread usage of such technology is still in a discovery/solutions phase.” XHamster countered that most of the material on its site featuring younger-looking performers is legal, and not barely. Yet we now live in a world where we know, even if we don’t see it and just read the news, that child sex abuse material sometimes ends up on wildly popular tube sites like Pornhub.