Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around:
At first glance, it seems like a solid question. Why can’t they? There are a few reasons.
Do you see much porn on Facebook?
The first revolves around who “they” are. When “big tech” shuts something down, it’s usually just that company removing specific content from their servers, like when Twitter kicked Donald Trump off their platform.
In these cases, child porn already isn’t a problem. Content moderation on social media is a huge ugly problem to solve, and those companies work hard to keep things clean and tend to do a pretty good job of it. I suspect you’ve not seen any child porn on Facebook or Twitter, probably ever. They keep their networks pretty clean (arguably to a fault at times, but it’s a tough job).
Bad stuff goes underground
The problem with stopping major problems such as a child porn is that it’s not published in a place that’s controlled by big tech. This stuff is often on servers in foreign countries where the local authorities really don’t care. If some guy has a server full of that trash operating out of Tolyatti, Russia, how do you stop him from here? It’s not easy.
Going a step further, much of this stuff is moving to the dark web where it’s almost impossible to track. Every site on the dark web is accessed by bouncing around to a bunch of different servers between you and them, making both identities nearly impossible to determine.
There’s no good solution
When people understand that, the cry is then to “nerd harder”! Certainly Google or Facebook could do something about this, right? Not really. Again, if a dude sets up a nasty server in a foreign country, Google and Facebook can easily block that content on their platforms, but it’s still out there on the web for others to access.
The solution to fix that is a nationwide firewall, similar to what China has, where the government controls what you’re able to see. Even with the best of intentions behind it, that would be a very slippery slope with awful consequences.
I’m sorry to say, but I don’t have anything resembling an answer to this problem. Just know that big tech indeed works very hard to “shut down child porn” on their platforms, but have little control to stop it everywhere else.
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