Digital technologies have brought unprecedented benefits for people everywhere – including children. They have also created conditions for technology-facilitated abuse. Online, offenders can easily contact potential child victims, generate CSEA content and share it on a global scale.

Policymakers have urged digital service providers to prioritise protecting children, be accountable to how they say they combat CSEA, provide effective safety measures and be transparent about the known CSEA on their services and how they address it.  Efforts to date, however, have been insufficient, as CSEA remains a persistent menace that overshadows the many benefits the digital environment affords. Collective action by all stakeholders is needed to combat this abhorrent crime. 

Robust and reliable data is crucial for combatting CSEA. This includes data on how much CSEA is found on different services, what is being done to prevent its facilitation through these services, whether these efforts are working and what their impact on human rights is. 

This information can be provided by companies in their transparency reports. However, when transparency reports differ from one another in the metrics they provide, in the time periods that they cover and in the way they make their reports available for further analysis or comparisons with data from previous reports, it only serves to further cloud the issue.  Without common and consistent reporting, policymakers cannot gain a sector-wide perspective on CSEA online, compare platforms’ responses and assess the efficacy of their countermeasures. 

The alarming growth of CSEA online demands urgent action informed by a solid evidence base. That evidence base depends in part upon sound transparency reporting by digital service providers. To help gauge the state of transparency reporting, the OECD has benchmarked the CSEA policies and practices of the top-50 online content-sharing services. 

The research reveals that 60% of these services do not issue a transparency report specifically addressing CSEA. Of those that do, the information they provide in their transparency reports is inconsistent and uneven across services. To improve the evidence base, more – and more consistent – transparency reporting is needed.

CSEA is a complex and multifaceted problem comprising different forms of abuse and exploitation. To understand what they expressly prohibit, it is important that online content-sharing services define CSEA with specificity.  Without such a definition, users – including children – cannot know what is forbidden in the digital spaces they inhabit, and therefore cannot fully gauge the risk these services pose. For policymakers, if they do not know what a service considers to be CSEA, they cannot have a clear idea of how these services are responding to CSEA.  

Despite this, OECD research reveals that only 10 of the top-50 online content-sharing services have policies that clearly explain what CSEA related content and activity they prohibit, and even within those 10, what is captured is different.