What will Elon Musk’s Global Internet Mean for the World’s Most Vulnerable Children? hint: it’s not good.
By: Rachel Van Ellenberg
Tags: Philippines, Child Exploitation, Technology, Elon Musk, Starlink

The SpaceX Starlink trials are underway in Northern USA and soon to begin in Canada, bringing nearer to fruition Elon Musk’s goal of cheap and accessible worldwide internet service. This service is provided by thousands of Starlink satellites circling the earth, and users can access it for roughly $600 upfront — $499 for a tripod, router, and terminal to connect to the satellites, and $99 for a monthly subscription. And Musk has plans to make the equipment more affordable for users.

Most people paint a positive light on worldwide interconnectedness and Musk’s technological advancements for the planet. In his Forbes article “Elon Musk’s 42,000 Starlink Satellites Could Just Save the World,” John Koetsier, clearly a fan if you read the title, points out how access to information can lift people out of poverty and oppression. He states that people in censored countries may soon realize that the information they are being fed is one-sided. Though the internet is fairly widespread already now, countries such as China, Russia, India, Iran, Syria, and Vietnam have firewalls to contain information or spread misinformation. While he acknowledges that even with Starlink’s accessibility such countries will still maintain censorship, he suggests it will be more obvious, leading citizens to question exactly what their governments are trying to hide. Other than repressive regimes, those who criticize Starlink tend to be stargazers who are concerned for how the beautiful night sky might forever be marred by whizzing satellites, or paranoids who are convinced 5G will bring diseases to all of us.

Few, however, have considered another insidious side effect of the soon to be more accessible world-wide internet. Expanding the internet also expands the reach of internet-based crime, specifically the online sexual exploitation of children (OSEC).

Consider the Philippines as a case study, which is the globe’s largest known source of cases of OSEC: The combination of widespread, inexpensive internet access via mobile devices, a high English language proficiency among the population, a historic commercial sex industry, and a robust money remittance infrastructure have all contributed to the high prevalence rate of OSEC (p.17).

We are seeing that vulnerable children in developing countries can be exploited online in ways that they were previously targeted by traveling offenders, especially in countries with widespread internet access and under-resourced justice systems (p.15). According to a study done by International Justice Mission earlier this year to understand the nature of this crime, more than half of the victims were under the age of 12. Nine percent of the victims were just 0–3 years old.

Children are being sexually exploited in front of screens, live-streamed to customers in wealthy developed nations, who can direct their abuse in real time.

Please don’t mistake me for a Luddite who throws out much of the benefits of a more interconnected world because of the associated negative consequences. I’d be a hypocrite if I conducted all my research on the internet, published on the internet, and denied that right to billions around the globe because they are at risk for exploitation. After all, it is often customers in wealthy developed nations where 2/3 of the population is online such as Canada, America, Australia, the UK, and the Netherlands who are driving the demand for children as a product. But there should be greater awareness of this specific online abuse of children in light of the rapid expansion of internet accessibility, and there needs to be more collaboration between tech companies, law enforcement, and agencies that work to combat violence against children.

International Justice Mission has been active in the Philippines for 20 years collaborating with the justice system to fight the sexual exploitation of children, and recently they expanded their casework to include this exploitation online. They conducted their study in collaboration with the US TIP Office and the Philippine Inter-Agency Council Against Trafficking to “set a baseline of the existing global data and catalyze future research efforts” (p.10) Examining data from Cyber TipLine reports submitted to the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) by internet service providers as well as cases investigated by law enforcement agencies, they found there was a sharp and consistent rise in the number of Philippine IP addresses used for child sexual exploitation (CSE) between 2014–2017. In fact, the number of IP addresses used for CSE annually more than tripled in the study period (p.45).

Also troubling is their finding that OSEC is generally a family-based crime. Traffickers who exploited the children tended to be younger Filipina women, often family members of the victims. The average victim count per case was 4, meaning that siblings or extended family members were generally exploited together (p.12). The familial nature of the crime means that providing restoration for survivors of OSEC is uniquely challenging. The usual family supports helpful for victimized and traumatized children are problematic in these cases. They are not safe in their own homes, and may be at risk around their fellow victimized siblings even after they are rescued.

What would motivate family members and caretakers to harm their own children, nieces, and neighbours? The study suggests traffickers are economically motivated, as they received payment through money transfer agencies from Western customers. And though the amount paid varied widely per case, in all cases it was equivalent to days or weeks of Philippine minimum wage (p.66).

Although IJM collaborates with local justice systems to arrest and convict perpetrators, they prioritize rescuing victims and restoring them using trauma-informed care. The study highlighted that victims were subject to the crime for an average of 2 years before they were rescued. One of the reasons it is difficult to find victims quickly is that electronic service providers (ESPs) often do not monitor live-stream platforms, and digital evidence of live-streamed content is often not stored (p.16). While companies are not required to search for illicit content on their servers, once they discover it they have a duty to report it to NCMEC. They also must keep a record of the report for 90 days while NCMEC conducts an investigation and determines what to send to law enforcement. Most of the tech industry lacks the resources to proactively address the issue. For example, in 2019 only 12 companies made up of 99% of all reports to NCMEC. And in fact, 2/3 of the reports sent are from only one company (Facebook Messenger).

Another challenge in addressing this crime is that accessing child sexual assault material is relatively low risk for perpetrators, because of the sheer volume for law enforcement to sift through. In the Philippine-focused study, most communication occurred in English and on the surface of the internet, not on the dark web (p.12). Clearly perpetrators felt secure enough in their anonymity to carry out their illegal transactions in relatively plain sight.

While reports may be made to NCMEC when an image or video is discovered on a certain platform, this doesn’t stop perpetrators from sharing it on other platforms undetected. Agencies are constantly playing catch up to remove images and discover how to help victims and track abusers.

Fortunately, there are tech companies working on software to fix some of these inefficiencies. Safer is a program being developed by Thorn, a non-profit committed to combatting child sex trafficking using technology. What this program does is assign a “numeric fingerprint” known as a “hash” to explicit content, so that it can match previously identified content. Images can then easily be tracked and removed at scale horizontally across multiple platforms, rather than removing images ad-hoc whenever they are shared across the web. It also protects investigators and employees from having to look at the image in order to take it down. Microsoft has created a similar program called PhotoDNA, an image matching technology. These are great examples of the collaborative approach between tech developers, law enforcement, and child protection agencies sharing resources horizontally rather than in separate silos.

Thorn has also developed a method to reach out directly to the perpetrators attempting to access this material, encouraging them to seek help. Perpetrators may then realize this is not an anonymous or victimless crime. Google and Microsoft have also initiated blocking efforts to disrupt the search of abusive images, reducing the number of searches by 67% compared with a non-blocking search engine. These advances help to address the issue by increasing the risk and decreasing the anonymity of customers or sharers of illegal content (p.26).

In 2000, only 413 million people around the globe were using the Internet. In 2016, the number had increased to 3.4 billion. Roughly half the world is online, and while poorer regions show lower usage rates than wealthier regions, the usage is increasing quickly. There is no doubt that with the introduction of Musk’s Starlink Internet Service and his desire to provide low-cost internet access even to remote areas, the world’s online population will continue to grow. Again, while there are many benefits to this, it comes at a cost.

What happens when an economically challenged family discovers an easy way to exploit their neighbours, siblings, or their own children online to make ends meet? What if they themselves had been abused or exploited (one in 3 women have), and manipulated into believing it was a way they could support their family, and therefore consider this crime to be a valid economic option? What if law enforcement is under-resourced and untrained on how to identify victims and perpetrators of OSEC? And what if ESP’s haven’t developed a way to effectively monitor and report illicit live-streamed material? This adds up to devastating consequences for the world’s most vulnerable populations. We need to be aware of and prepared for this horrific situation, and work together across sectors to stop it. The OSEC study recommends:

“The tech sector, especially major tech platforms, should recognize the threat that undetected livestreaming exploitation presents to vulnerable children and choose to develop and deploy new technologies — including computer vision and machine learning applications of artificial intelligence — to detect newly produced child sexual exploitation material (CSEM) in all its forms, including in live video streams. Innovative technological solutions will lead to increased detection and reporting” (p. 74).

Tim Berners-Lee is the man who created, and now laments, the world wide web. He had intended it as an open, democratic platform for sharing data, and is now “devastated” by how it has been used to manipulate the 2016 American election results and sell personal data to large companies. He states:

“Along with a handful of powerful government agencies, [Facebook, Google, Amazon] are able to monitor, manipulate, and spy in unimaginable ways.”

The power of accessing consumer data means that billions of dollars are at stake, and large corporations are unlikely to completely relinquish the control over your data, privacy, and security information. Perhaps this information control could be used for the benefit of the world’s most vulnerable children?

These companies and government agencies, if they have the ability to collect information and create powerful personal algorithms to manipulate our information and sell our attention as products, could perhaps find a way to protect children around the world and report abusers. If you’re willing to give up some of your personal privacy to receive targeted ads for the latest waterproof sneakers, would you be willing to give it up if it meant another little girl or boy in the Philippines doesn’t live in fear in their own home?

“When weighing user privacy against possible detection of child exploitation, tech platforms should elevate the privacy interests of victimized children over those of platform users, and prioritize detection of all, but especially newly produced, CSEM.” (p.74)

The cult of awe surrounding Elon Musk’s name is well-deserved. The things he has aimed at and is achieving through his companies Tesla and SpaceX are things most people dismissed as dreams for the future, but not practically attainable at this moment in history. Musk has in many respects proven them wrong, and seems to enjoy disrupting industry standards. The globally accessible internet he is working towards has deeply troubling repercussions for the world’s poorest and most vulnerable children. But if ever there was a problem that seems unattainable, and yet has a largely technological solution, it is ending the online sexual exploitation of children. This seems a worthy goal that Musk, law enforcement, tech companies, money transfer agencies, and child protection agencies need to work together to achieve.