As Tech CEOs Are Grilled Over Child Safety Online, AI Is Complicating the Issue

The CEOs of five social media companies including Meta, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter) were grilled by Senators on Wednesday about how they are preventing online child sexual exploitation. The Senate Judiciary Committee called the meeting to hold the CEOs to account for what they said was a failure to prevent the abuse of minors, and ask whether they would support the laws that members of the Committee had proposed to address the problem. It is an issue that is getting worse, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which says reports of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reached a record high last year of more than 36 million, as reported by the Washington Post. The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children CyberTipline, a centralized system in the U.S. for reporting online CSAM, was alerted to more than 88 million files in 2022, with almost 90% of reports coming from outside the country. Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Shou Chew of TikTok, and Linda Yaccarino of X appeared alongside Jason Spiegel of Snap and Jason Citron of Discord to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee.