The EU Killed Voluntary CSAM Scanning. West Virginia Is Trying To Compel It. Both Cause Problems. Last week, the European Parliament voted to let a temporary exemption lapse that had allowed tech companies to scan their services for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) without running afoul of…

AI tools detect CSAM, grooming and self-harm, but nobody knows how well. Much of the AI industry has adopted 'model cards' for transparency—it's time the developers of child safety tools caught up, write Camille François, Margaret Mitchell, Yacine Jernite, Vinay Rao & J. Nathan Matias.

Protect trans kids.

@aaron.bsky.team shouting out how great using Osprey is for investigating! Go @roost.tools @julietshen.bsky.social #opensource #tssummit #trustandsafety

Anyone that has done content moderation before knows that emotional support/wellbeing tools are always developed secondary to the work (usually in response to burn out etc). Putting it first, ensures that moderators can take an approach to the work that actually centers their wellbeing.

Well. 😅

The lawsuit concerned allegations that Meta covered up its platforms’ impact on children's mental health and its knowledge of child exploitation online.

Meta is updating its child safety standards as countries across the globe consider social media bans for teenagers.

new from @katiemcque.bsky.social: @riana.bsky.social has talked about this at length, but the actionability of reports submitted by tech companies to NCMEC is a huge unsolved and growing problem www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

When Congress incentivizes over-reporting but leaves what to report up to platforms’ discretion (since for constitutional reasons the govt can’t tell private actors what to do), this is what you get. If NCMEC or LE can’t directly tell platforms what to (not) do, they drag them in the press instead.

West Virginia’s Anti-Apple CSAM Lawsuit Would Help Child Predators Walk Free West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey wants you to think he's protecting children. His press release says so. His legal complaint opens with the genuinely horrific line that Apple has, in internal communications,…

Through the EU's DSA and US litigation, new evidence is emerging about how social media platforms understand and address risks to minors. Peter Chapman and Matt Steinberg analyze what these parallel processes uncover about how platforms assess risk and design.

🫠

The American president is more insulated from accountability than a British royal. Our political system provides the elite with immunity. It has to change.

Amid the deals and demos at the India AI Impact Summit this week, the opportunity to shift the global debate about AI and what kind of world we are building appears to be lost, writes Tech Policy Press contributing editor Amber Sinha. www.techpolicy.press/indias-ai-su...

OK "god bless america" and then naming every country in the americas from south to north is absolute king shit

A must read fiction book honoring Fred in the best way. SO good. One of my fave books this year! Even more chilling with what is happening now.

New #research from Resolver “The Com” my takeaway: this isn’t one group it’s a growing network of online harms that spreads across platforms and mixes CSAM, self-harm, extremism & cybercrime. Addressing it requires coordinated action. No more silos! Read the full briefing here: ter.li/7ffbot

Incredibly rough to read but there needs to be more clarity in what platforms need to report to NCMEC & LE these annotations in the form are confusing.

It is very cool!!

This is huge news. I have spent the past 6 months wondering wtf was up with Amazon: they filed 380,000 AI-related CyberTipline reports to NCMEC in the first half of 2025. Turns out ALL of it was known CSAM they found by screening their AI training data. It's NOT AI-generated or AI-morphed CSAM.

production-grade tools for online safety CAN be built in the public, and CAN be collaboratively developed by engineers across different organizations. We're proud to announce Osprey and so grateful to all the contributors who made this possible! Release notes here: github.com/roostorg/osp...

I'm over a week late in reading this, but huge kudos to Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong for doing the thing I thought nobody seemed to be doing, which is asking xAI's investors why they're giving money to the deepfake NCII/CSAM machine (spoiler alert: no answers): www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

The EU is the latest regulator to investigate X’s Grok over AI-generated sexual abuse. Ramsha Jahangir reports on where governments stand — and what the fragmented response shows about the challenges of protecting children online across borders.

Our new memorandum of understanding with @ofcom.bsky.social builds on strong existing relationship and lays the groundwork for how we can assist Ofcom in its duties under the Online Safety Act. Read more on our website. www.iwf.org.uk/news-media/n...

@cassidyjames.com and I will be at #FOSDEM and will be demoing* Osprey in our talk Sunday morning: fosdem.org/2026/schedul... *Let's be honest, should we really test the wifi and live demo overlords first thing Sunday morning? Probably not. Probably pre-recorded.

Online safety laws like the DSA are expanding. For hosting providers and registrars, the challenge is building safety models that align with new and emerging laws. On Feb 4, DTSP is hosting a webinar on how DTSP’s Safe Framework supports domain registries with compliance.

Companies should NOT be criticized for the amount CSAM reported. Companies SHOULD be criticized for sending high FP rates to NCMEC & low quality reports ie no location or data that can’t go to LE these def slow down helping kids!! #childsafety #ncmec #reportact www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Funding ICE yet Trump admin has aggressively rolled back efforts to combat human trafficking, including sex trafficking, and cut funding to support survivors of these crimes: www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

ICE murdered Renée Good in broad daylight. Less than 3 weeks later, they killed Alex Pretti, shooting him 10 times. Every day, we watch as people are ripped from their cars, their homes, their lives. We can't allow ourselves to look away from this cruelty. Abolish ICE.

I spoke with WIRED about the risks online age verification present, especially under the threat of an administration that will do anything in their power to surveil, oppress, and kill us. www.wired.com/story/age-ve...

Well that is comforting

This is why there is no free speech without anonymous speech. This is why online ID checks / age verification is incompatible with the 1st amendment and human rights. This is why "make everyone use their real names" is not a real solution to online hate & harm www.politico.com/newsletters/...

- if your friends & coworkers are still using X or if they like to use Grok, ask them why they're supporting the NCII/CSAM machine - ask your state AG's office what they're doing about this - and, of course, ICE must be abolished www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/u...

A few options: * If you've been victimized: 19thnews.org/2025/05/take... www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-m... * Tell Apple & Google to nix Grok/X from app stores: www.theverge.com/policy/85990... * Write to xAI's investors: x.ai/news/series-e * Call your reps: www.wyden.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

Must read article.

2026 is poised to be another landmark year for the child online safety debate in the US. To get a sense of what's to come, Tech Policy Press senior editor Cristiano Lima-Strong spoke to Common Sense Media's Amina Fazlullah, CDT's Kate Ruane, and the Digital Progress Institute's Joel Thayer.

This was a month ago, since then, X has become an industrial scale child sexual abuse material and non-consensual intimate images factory, producing thousands of such images rapidly. I find it surprising that StopNCII even still lists X as a partner. They should be removed.

putting it behind a paywall is not "turning it off" lol what www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NCOSE, the central group pushing KOSA and other censorship bills, not only is verified on X, but is actively using the CSAM scandal to milk engagement on the platform. X is currently ignoring age-verification laws in multiple states, but instead of boycotting, they're juicing.

In case you've seen the story about “grok now only generates images for paid users”, it's untrue. Apparently everyone just reported it because… it was what grok told them 🤦🏼 www.theverge.com/news/859309/...

“what ensued was countless more images produced by Grok at user requests that were much more explicit, and eventually, some of those were underage,” St. Clair said. “Photos of me of 14 years old, undressed and put in a bikini.” www.nbcnews.com/tech/elon-mu...

There's an old saying in business that you should never launch an enterprise product on the same day as your CSAM scandal. But Elon didn't get to where he is playing by the rules

just gonna drop some links to a few papers of mine about AI-CSAM and the law here, for no particular reason cyber.fsi.stanford.edu/news/ai-csam... (May 2025) partnershiponai.org/hai-research... (November 2024) www.lawfaremedia.org/article/addr... (February 2024)

I still can't get over the fact that the AI Safety Institute, which produces safety guidance like this one published yesterday, had to be renamed "AI Security Institute" because safety is a trigger word for some

Senator Durbin has had this explained to him multiple times. Getting rid of 230 doesn't help this, but will make it worse. It will make it impossible for smaller sites to exist (like this one) and will give MORE POWER to companies like Meta and X. Why would Durbin want to do that?

PSA don’t buy a lovesac couch. Just don’t. It’s the worst customer service experience I’ve ever had trying to get this horrid thing returned. If I get divorced blame this couch. I hate it. 😭

Nudes. Suggestive videos. You name it – children are sharing it. Whether they’re sharing their own images or forwarding them from others, it’s important that we talk about the risks. Download our How to Talk guide for top tips on how to get the conversation started: www.thinkbeforeyoushare.org.

For me, the most telling thing about the Australia ban in particular is that the government communication to teenagers about it includes significant amounts of crisis response and suicide prevention information. Because the government knows they're yanking a lifeline out from under a lot of people.

Counterpoint: don’t