We call them “social media”, but one of their main lines of business is social misery. We’re talking about the most nauseating crimes imaginable, enabled by the world’s biggest tech companies, on a scale never seen in human history.
“If you look in 2022,” Inman Grant tells me, “the global information and communications industry was worth $US5.3 trillion and in the US alone there were 600,000 companies. Now Photo DNA has its 15th anniversary and Microsoft still licenses it. How many companies do you think are likely using Photo DNA right now? Two hundred.”
If any of this sounds a bit complex, allow Inman Grant to clarify – these corporations are delivering “the holy grail for paedophiles”, she says. “They can store videos and images of child sexual services for free and with no risk of detection. I can’t tell you how important these end-user managed hosting services are.”
Johansson sets out the severity of the suffering that seems so trivial to so many of these corporations. She tells me that reporting in the US shows that 50 per cent of the victims of online child sexual abuse are babies and toddlers: “What Internet Watch Foundation in the UK found last year is that category A violence against children, the worst violence, that doubled in three years. And they also saw that with children under the age of two, it’s 80 per cent category A violence.
Johansson has proposed laws for the EU: “That’s why I have put forward an EU legislation that all companies have to do a risk assessment and, based on that, they have to do mitigating measures – that is safety by design,” a principle advocated by Inman Grant. “And if that is not enough they can be obliged to scan, to use scanning technologies. I’m fighting to have it approved.”