The 2024 Gratitude Report is here! Your passion, advocacy, and dedication to preserve human dignity has achieved a mountain of victories in the fight against sexual exploitation this year.
To celebrate, let’s take a look back on all progress we’ve made together toward three key objectives:
- Ensure Tech Prioritizes Child Protection Over Profit
- Drive Societal Change to Reject Pornography
- End the Demand for Paid Sex that Drives Sex Trafficking.
Ensure Tech Prioritizes Child Protection Over Profit
It was Christmas break. A peaceful morning. Bonnie (pseudonym) was reflecting on last night’s conversation with her 16-year-old son, Colin (pseudonym). He’d shared how he planned to save up his money for a trip to visit some friends.
Bonnie noticed that Colin’s light was on now—his bedroom door ajar. She walked upstairs and nudged the door open, asking, “Are you up?”
And that’s when she found her son, unresponsive on his bed.
Colin is only one of numerous teens who have died by suicide after being sexually extorted. A stranger reached out to him on the app, pretending to be a teenage girl, and then manipulated him into sending a nude image. From there, Colin was blackmailed and eventually took his own life.
But what if that stranger could never message Colin to begin with? What if social media apps had protections in place to prevent predators from reaching children?
Tragically, it’s too late for Colin. But it is not too late for the billions of teens who still use social media today.
With you at our side, we are fighting to save lives! Here are some of the landmark victories we’ve achieved this year in our fight to protect children online, all thanks to supporters like you.
This Year’s Victories to Protect Children Online:
- You prevented 21,600 sextortion incidents, sextortion researcher Paul Raffile estimated. With your help, we convinced Google and Apple to remove Wizz, a dangerous app called the “Tinder for Teens.” Wizz targeted teens seeking romantic or sexual connections, with 40% of English-speaking users, mostly minors, experiencing sextortion. Although reinstated, the app appears to be safer.
- Instagram has made teen accounts private by default and added crucial safety features to protect young users. Teens can only be messaged or tagged by people they follow, and accounts are set to the highest content restrictions. The impact of these safety updates can’t be overstated. Instagram is the #1 platform where sextortion happens—a risk that will be significantly mitigated by these safety changes.
- In January, the Senate Judiciary Committee grilled the CEOs of Meta, X, TikTok, Snap, and Discord over child sexual exploitation on their platforms, with NCOSE helping the Committee prepare for the hearing. Thanks to your advocacy, Congress is more energized to address this issue, and many companies have implemented important safety changes in response to public pressure.
Drive Societal Change to Reject Pornography
One spring day, Jodie (pseudonym) received an anonymous message with a link to a pornography website. When she clicked on it, her world imploded.
There, right in front of Jodie’s eyes, were multiple pornographic images and a video, depicting herself with various men.
Yet Jodie had never taken these photos! She’d never even met these men!
“I was screaming and crying and violently scrolling through my phone to work out what I was reading and what I was looking at,” Jodie says. “I knew this could genuinely ruin my life.”
Devastated, she continued to investigate further, and found that the images and video were forged using AI. This is AI-generated image-based sexual abuse (AI-generated IBSA, commonly called “deepfake pornography”). It can happen to anyone.
But as terrifying as this problem is, thanks to you, hope is shining through! Together, we’ve made enormous progress in the fight against IBSA and the pornography industry.
This Year’s Victories in the Fight Against Pornography:
- Microsoft’s GitHub banned all projects that encourage or suggest the creation of AI-generated IBSA. Thanks to your efforts in the Dirty Dozen List campaign, GitHub removed several repositories hosting codes for creating AI-generated IBSA, including the code behind 95% of deepfakes. The company also signed a White House agreement to combat AI-generated IBSA.
- We have seen incredible progress on numerous bills combatting image-based sexual abuse (IBSA, i.e. non-consensually created or distributed sexually explicit content). The TAKE IT DOWN Act, the DEFIANCE Act and the SHIELD Act all passed the Senate, with TAKE IT DOWN and DEFIANCE’s passage being unanimous. Massachusetts also became the 49th state to criminalize IBSA.
- Our lawsuit against Pornhub received class certification this year, meaning any survivor of child sexual abuse material distributed on Pornhub will be entitled to compensation, if the lawsuit is won. Pornhub was also ordered to put a notice about the class action lawsuit on their website!
End the Demand for Paid Sex That Drives Sex Trafficking
At 17-years-old, Angela lived alone. She was working two jobs while attending school, struggling to stay afloat financially. That’s when Andre entered her life. Recruiting her under the guise of working for a modeling studio, Angela was eventually sex trafficked in a legal Nevada brothel.
She would hide at the end of a lineup of girls, praying she wouldn’t be picked by the sex buyers. When she was, she was forced to perform degrading sexual acts. When Angela’s exploiter told sex buyers that she was underage, they weren’t dissuaded—in fact, some even required her to engage in sexual situations centered on the idea of her being an underage teen.
The sex buyers paid to abuse Angela, and her traffickers got all the money.
Sex buyers must be held accountable for their abuse of women and children in the sex trade. And they must be deterred if we are ever to end sex trafficking! The prostitution and sex trafficking marketplace only exists because the dollars of sex buyers fuels them. No Buyers=No Business.
This Year’s Victories Towards Ending the Demand for Paid Sex:
- Thanks to the courageous work of survivors and allies, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and Delaware have all passed legislation to increase criminal penalties against sex buyers. Sex buying is now a felony on first offense in North Carolina and Oklahoma, and paying to sexually abuse a minor is a felony in Delaware.
- Rhode Island’s efforts to fully decriminalize pimping, sex buying, and brothel keeping were STOPPED thanks to your support. Together, we have successfully defeated every single full decriminalization bill we have ever fought. Talk about power!
- Fueled by your support, the NCOSE Law Center is representing courageous sex trafficking survivors who are speaking out against the legal system of prostitution in Nevada that enabled their exploitation. It is a dirty fight and our survivor clients have received some incredibly unjust rulings—but with your support, we are pushing back! We will not let these brave survivors be silenced.
THANK YOU!
Once again, we want to extend our gratitude to YOU for making these victories happen. Your support powers our work every single day and we’re eager to see the progress we’ll make together in the years to come.
Be sure to read even more victories by downloading the 2024 Gratitude Report below!
