Get the latest tech news

Are porn algorithms feeding a generation of paedophiles – or creating one?


More than 850 men a month are arrested for online child abuse offences in England and Wales. They come from every walk of life: teachers, police officers, doctors, TV presenters. And the numbers are rising every year. How did this happen?

Last year was the worst on record for instances of online child sexual abuse imagery, with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation acting to remove content from 300,000 web pages, each containing at least one, if not hundreds or thousands, of illegal images and videos. Now, police, charities, lawyers and child protection experts are asking what is driving this tidal wave of offending, and finding one common thread: the explosion over the past 10 to 20 years of free-to-view and easily accessible online pornography. The scale of the problem faced by the police was made clear to the public last year, when former BBC presenter Huw Edwards was given a suspended sentence, avoiding jail time, after being found guilty of accessing indecent photographs of children as young as seven.

Get the Android app

Or read this on Hacker News

Read more on:

Photo of generation

generation

Photo of Paedophiles

Paedophiles

Photo of porn algorithms

porn algorithms

Related news:

News photo

Next-generation audio models in the API

News photo

zlib-ng: zlib replacement with optimizations for "next generation" systems

News photo

All this bad AI is wrecking a whole generation of gadgets | We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.