'Staggering' fivefold rise in child sex images found on Facebook

Child abuse images found on Facebook have increased five-fold, sparking new calls for the company to scrap its plans to encrypt messages across all its platforms. This compares with just five million pieces of content in the previous quarter, an increase that the children’s charity NSPCC described as “staggering” and “alarming.” “It shows just how much Facebook is used by offenders,” said Andy Burrows, head of child safety online policy at the NSPCC. “With such an alarming amount of child abuse identified, Facebook must quickly ensure they have technology in place to be able to continue identifying abuse in end-to-end encrypted environments before they roll out the feature across their services.” Pedophiles free to share images Facebook which also owns Instagram and Whatsapp is proposing to introduce end-to-end encryption that would mean even it and its scrutineers would not be able to access or read the content of any messages - leaving paedophiles potentially free to share images. Facebook said the 25 million posts were found because of improvements to its “proactive detection technology” for videos and “media-matching” capability which allowed it to remove “more old, violating content.” Media matching is technology that allows the company to search for images that are similar to those previously removed but which may have been doctored or edited in an effort to prevent their discovery. We have led the industry in developing new ways to prevent, detect and respond to abuse and will continue to do so.’” The Government and its Five Eyes intelligence partners - the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand - have warned Facebook its encryption plans will enable terrorists, child abusers and other criminals to flourish because of the inability of the company and enforcement agencies to investigate harmful content.