The internet has made our lives easier in many ways. We are able to purchase items online and have them delivered almost immediately. We can find people who like that same rare dog breed as us, and share an endless number of photos with them on Instagram. We can react to content – be it funny memes or breaking news – in real-time.
But the same frictionless experience most of us enjoy for education, entertainment or connection with others has also been leveraged by those looking to do harm - and the internet does not discriminate in the speed, reach, access and efficiency it provides to all users.
Content moves freely and abundantly online. Every minute, 500 hours of video are posted to YouTube and 243,000 photos are uploaded on Facebook. Unfortunately, this proliferation has also applied to harmful content. In the past year, the number of reports of child exploitation images circulating online has doubled to 45 million. On Facebook alone, 11.6 million pieces of content on child nudity and sexual exploitation of children were removed in Q3 of 2019, a substantial increase on the previous quarter. Harassment and bullying, terrorist propaganda and the use of fake accounts to spam or defraud is also spreading across many sites.
It is hard to delineate how much of the increase in harmful content is attributable to a greater circulation of this type of content versus improvements in detecting and enforcing action on this content. Regardless, spaces online are being used by predators and other bad actors to accelerate illegal and harmful activity in an unprecedented way. Many have argued that this type of activity has always existed, but that the open web is just now uncovering it. However, digital disruption, which has created a frictionless user experience, and a shift toward advertising-based business models based on maximizing engagement, has made it quicker and easier for all types of content to reach a massive scale. But with so much technology and knowledge at our fingertips why haven’t we been more successful in ‘cleaning up’ spaces online?