Some companies that made a small number of reports ended up finding a large volume of imagery. For victims of child sexual abuse, the recirculating imagery, commonly known as child pornography, can cause lasting trauma. The growth in reported imagery, however, does not offer insights into whether more of the illegal content is being newly produced and posted online. The number of reported videos spiked in 2018 when Facebook ramped up its detection efforts. Encryption would make it much more difficult to detect the illegal imagery on Messenger, which was also the largest source of reported material in 2018.

Source: New York Times February 07, 2020 15:35 UTC