President Joe Biden signed the REPORT Act into law on Tuesday, requiring tech companies to report a wider range of crimes against children than previously required, and social media platform X is already touting its "aggressive" enforcement.
X, formerly Twitter, said that in the first quarter of 2024, it has already submitted approximately 175,000 reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's (NCMEC) CyberTipline and suspended 1.5 million accounts for prohibited content or actions including child sexual exploitation (CSE) material, grooming, blackmail, and identifying alleged victims of CSE.
The bipartisan Revising Existing Procedures on Reporting via Technology (REPORT) Act, authored by U.S. Senators Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.), requires internet companies such as Facebook, Instagram and X to report crimes against children involving sex trafficking, grooming, or the enticement of children for sexual acts. They were previously only required to report child sexual abuse materials (CSAM).
"X applauds Senator Blackburn's leadership in combating the exploitation of children, strengthening critical partners like NCMEC, and helping law enforcement bring criminals to justice," X CEO Linda Yaccarino said in a statement.
X on Tuesday announced it is participating in the beta of the Safer Predict Child Sexual Abuse text classifier developed by Thorn, the nonprofit anti-trafficking company founded by actors Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. The technology is designed to help "detect sextortion patterns and other exploitative behavior and content." The company also announced its participation in Tech Coalition's Project Lantern, to share data with other participating companies to identify cross-platform bad actors that use multiple services to traffic CSE.
The company said it is "steadily building" its X Support Center in Austin, Texas, and training more agents to increase content moderation capacity.
"Children are increasingly looking at screens, and the reality is that this leaves more innocent kids at risk of online exploitation," said Blackburn. "I'm honored to champion this bipartisan solution alongside Senator Ossoff and Representative Laurel Lee to protect vulnerable children and hold perpetrators of these heinous crimes accountable. I also appreciate the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children's unwavering partnership to get this across the finish line."
The NCMEC's CyberTipline is a centralized reporting system for the online exploitation of children, taking reports from across the country and making them available to the appropriate law enforcement agencies. The new legislation increases the amount of time the CyberTipline is allowed to preserve reported evidence for law enforcement, from 90 days previously to one year. It also for the first time allows victims and their parents to report abuse directly to the NCMEC.
Along with requiring a wider range of crimes to be reported, the REPORT Act also increases penalties for companies that fail to report exploitative content, with fines ranging from $150,000 to $1 million, depending on the offense and the size of the company.
"My bipartisan law with Senator Blackburn will ensure tech companies are held accountable to report and remove child sex abuse material and to strengthen protection for kids online," said Ossoff. "At a time of such division in Congress, we successfully brought Republicans and Democrats together to protect kids on the internet, and now our bill is law."
--with reporting by TMX
