The number of reports of suspected sexual abuse of children has grown exponentially in recent years. The high volume, up from about 100,000 in 2009, has overwhelmed the national clearinghouse and law enforcement officials alike. A 2019 study by The Times found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation could only manage its caseload from the clearinghouse by limiting itself to infants and toddlers.
Ms Davis said policies that resulted in more reports could exacerbate the bottleneck. “If the system is too full of things that aren’t useful,” she said, “it creates a real burden.”
But some current and former investigators said the decision should be made by law enforcement agencies.
“Nobody should decide not to report a potential crime, especially a crime against a child, because they feel the police are too busy,” said Chuck Cohen, who led a child exploitation task force in Indiana for 14 years.
Dana Miller, the commander of a similar task force in Wisconsin, said tech companies couldn’t know whether a report could be helpful in advancing an existing investigation. “While everyone is overwhelmed, we don’t feel comfortable making a blanket statement that we don’t want to see those reports,” she said.
Yiota Souras, general counsel at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, the national control center for the reports, said the center’s caseload “may not be at play here.” She said images should always be reported if a child is involved.
How Facebook does its age provisions is also a point of contention. According to the training paper and interviews, Facebook instructs its moderators to include so-called Tanner stages when assessing age. Originally developed in the late 1960s by Dr. James M. Tanner, a British pediatrician, outlines the tool’s progressive stages of puberty. But it was not designed to determine one’s age.
In a 1998 letter to the journal Pediatrics, Dr. Tanner said using the stages to measure “chronological age” when analyzing images of child sexual abuse was “totally illegal”. dr. Tanner died in 2010. The letter’s co-author, Dr. Arlan L. Rosenbloom, now a retired pediatric endocrinologist, said in an interview that a child of 13 or 14 could be “fully developed” under Tanner’s stages. He also characterized Meta’s approach as “a total abuse” of the scale.
