| Photo by Max Muselmann on Unsplash
“You have blood on your hands; your product is killing people.” This is the shocking challenge and accusation made to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, by Sen. Lindsey Graham during a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child safety.
Parents, beware: your kids are impacted for sure. This hearing follows the exploding child sexual abuse images that are proliferating on all platforms together with other harmful content through telecommunications companies. Is it time to tell the Philippine telecommunications the same thing?
The many postings and communications through the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the major platforms of social media are causing sex extortion, suicides, drug overdoses, blackmail, grooming leading to child rape, excessive gambling, scams, fraud, and other evils. Social media platforms are like crime scenes, but no one is held accountable. CEOs of social media platforms are being challenged to take responsibility and stop the crimes, abuse, and harm that their products are doing to children and adults. They must be held responsible and accountable for what they allow on their platforms.
There is a rising cry worldwide for the US to do more to control and discipline the content and change Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This means that platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and others cannot be held liable for what others post on their social media platforms. When passed, the lawmakers had no idea what that would do in time- unleash a torrent of hate speech, abuse, and lots of evil matter and activities carried on the platforms and published and shared without accountability.
Senator Durbin said that Discord is one of many social media platforms used for criminal purposes. “Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children. Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles; Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially sextort young victims.”
Responding to the drug sales over the platforms carried by all ISPs, including the Philippines’ PLDT, Globe, and Dito, the worst drug peddlers are selling dangerous drugs over the Internet and delivered by courier companies disguised as toiletries, cosmetics, and so on. Meanwhile, the Philippine war on drugs targeted impoverished users like malnourished, constantly exhausted pedicab cyclists like Ben Santos (not real name), that spent 50 pesos for a sachet of meth or shabu so he could keep pedaling and earning more into the night to feed his family. Ben was accosted one night by an unidentified anti-drug hit squad and shot dead. He likely refused to give up the name of his pusher.
The actual drug smugglers, traffickers, and users are the elites living in high-rise condos and getting their supplies over the Internet through the offending social media platforms for their high-powered, expensive parties and to satisfy their addictions. Many young teenagers have been enticed to buy fentanyl online through Instagram or Facebook and died. That led to the accusation to Zuckerberg that he had “blood on his hands.” So many have been killed as a result of crimes like illegal drug peddling. Who else also has blood on their hands?
“Unlike the weak laws or absence of them in the USA, the Philippine law protecting children from online sexual abuse is straightforward and robust. Still, it seems no government agency has the courage or commitment to enforce it. Do they have blood on their hands, too?”
How many thousands of young people have been psychologically damaged, groomed sexually, and abused online by the sex shows they are forced to participate in to gratify the sexual urges of local and foreign pedophiles? The pedophiles entice and pay relatives of the child victims to sexually abuse their own children or neighbors to gratify themselves while viewing small Filipino children being sexually abused online. All this by live streaming over the ISPs and media platforms. Some teenagers are lured into exposing themselves in sexually suggestive poses to a person they come to trust online but is an extortionist demanding money or sex. Some commit suicide.
This is allegedly what the accused priest, Father Karole Reward Israel, now jailed and on trial in Cagayan, Northern Philippines, did. He admits the acts of grooming and sexual encounters but claims it was consensual, yet he secretly videoed the alleged rape and sexual assault of the teenage victim. He then blackmailed her to continue being abused without complaining by threatening to expose the video online. This would not have been possible before the internet and social media platforms. The enablers of such crimes, like the ISPs, must be held accountable.
Thousands of children are victims of exploitation, and many can’t pay, and some commit suicide. All this online child abuse can be detected and blocked by high-powered AI software. The Philippine law demands that telecommunications corporations (telcos) and ISPs block child abuse material, even online streaming, by installing AI-powered detection and blocking software. Apparently, they are not doing it. The telcos say they effectively work with the Internet Watch Foundation and block or report thousands of offending websites.
However, they must install powerful AI-blocking software to identify bad content, filter and block it, capture the images, and report it to the police. It seems they don’t install that software, which some experts say would slow down the Internet and the fast-flowing money into the bank accounts of the telcos. The Philippines is a hub of such online abuse, and it continues, according to international police. The child abuse continues as reports are still coming in from international law enforcement agencies, investigators, and monitoring non-government organizations.
The case of three 10-year-old boys who watched child sexual abuse on a cellphone and then went and raped a six-year-old girl shows the terrible effect it has on children. There are hundreds of thousands of child-abusive blogs, websites, and illegal child abuse images and videos passing through the telcos and ISP servers daily. This is an alleged admission of failure to take adequate measures with AI software and start blocking the child abuse streaming and videos that pass through the servers. They could save thousands of children from abuse if they decided to do so.
Unlike the weak laws or absence of them in the USA, the Philippine law protecting children from online sexual abuse is straightforward and robust. Still, it seems no government agency has the courage or commitment to enforce it. Do they have blood on their hands, too?
