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The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Online Child Safety Ecosystem

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A Stanford Internet Observatory report (April 2024; Grossman, Pfefferkorn, Thiel, Shah, DiResta, Perrino, Cryst, Stamos, and Hancock) examining the US CyberTipline pipeline from platform report to potential prosecution. The preserved PDF is the version deposited in the Stanford Digital Repository (DOI 10.25740/pr592kc5483, CC BY-NC-ND).

The report is based on interviews with 66 people across law enforcement, NCMEC, platform trust-and-safety teams, prosecutors, and defense attorneys. Its core finding is that two CyberTipline reports can look nearly identical to a receiving officer while differing enormously in investigative value: one may describe no further illicit activity, another evidence of hands-on abuse. It attributes the system’s underperformance to incomplete platform reports, NCMEC’s strained technical infrastructure, and legal constraints on NCMEC and law enforcement, and closes with recommendations for platforms, NCMEC, and Congress.

This is the strongest empirical account the wiki holds of what happens to a CSAM report after a platform files it, and it anchors NCMEC CyberTipline and the pipeline section of Automated CSAM detection. It documents the same over-reporting incentive that produced the cases in CSAM scanning externalizes error costs. Limitation: interview-based and US-specific; the CyberTipline’s structure has no close analog elsewhere.

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