Distinguishing Digital Predators

Why the fight against online child exploitation requires different tactics for different enemies

When I was nine years old, my parents took my siblings and me on a three-week summer vacation to Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Glacier National Parks. Among the vague and confused recollections of geysers and snow-capped peaks, one memory stands out prominently: grizzly bears. Not that we saw any, mind you. But for weeks before the trip, my parents had us watch documentary videos (featuring grotesquely scarred bear attack survivors) about what to do if you encountered one—and crucially, how to tell a grizzly bear apart from a black bear. Black bears are a nuisance to any camper: they love your garbage, and if you don’t suspend it high above the ground, you may be in for a rude awakening when one comes lumbering around your campsite in the middle of the night. But they’re not going to kill you, and probably won’t even take a swipe at you. A hungry grizzly bear fresh out of hibernation, though, is quite another matter. So it’s critical to know which you’re dealing with, and plan your response accordingly.

This metaphor came irresistibly to mind as I listened to the deliberations of the Age Verification Summit convened earlier this month in DC. In the wake of a landmark Supreme Court decision upholding states’ rights to require age verification for accessing pornographic websites, we assembled 30 of the country’s leading child online safety experts, constitutional lawyers, and technologists to map the path forward to a new internet—one with age-gated spaces and experiences, like the physical world. Before us loomed a complex thicket of what social theorists call a “wicked problem”: how to protect children from the myriad harms of early exposure to the digital world, when the portals to these harms are so numerous, so interconnected, and have become fundamental communication and indeed education tools that everyone—kids and adults—rely on. 

The worst of these harms is clearly online pornography, which is highly addictive for adolescent minds, tends toward the graphic, extreme, and violent, and has tended to rewire young adult sexual behavior toward the poles of either sexual impotence or sexual aggression. But others loom in the neighborhood: addictive social media, with its devastating effects on teen mental health and its gateways to pornographic content, and smartphone apps that provide sexual predators a backdoor into children’s bedrooms. Many of the purveyors of these products are now multi-trillion-dollar companies with a near stranglehold on the digital economy. How to fight back? An inchoate hypothesis for how to protect childhood in a digital age seemed to emerge from the discussion, however: divide and conquer—and begin by distinguishing black bears from grizzly bears. 

The metaphor, like all metaphors, is too tame: the pornography companies devour souls while grizzlies are just content with flesh and bones; and the social media and smartphone companies, with their growing body count of teen suicides, are certainly worse than black bears. But it still provides a useful illustration of how to tailor political strategy to tackle this wicked problem.

After all, even if it’s high time to recognize and regulate Big Tech as a vice industry, not all vices are created equal. Recall that in The Godfather, Don Corleone was more than happy to profit from gambling and liquor, but drew the line at importing heroin. So in the world of digital vice, there remains an important distinction between the “respectable” tech companies that profit from attention addiction and turn a blind eye to the collateral harms, and the companies that traffic in human flesh and human souls. Companies like Pornhub, as Nicholas Kristof has relentlessly documented, are among the most depraved corporate actors on the planet, well aware that they are profiting from child sex trafficking, and concerned only to keep it out of the public eye. They will take legal setbacks like Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton in stride, with no intention of complying with age verification laws any more than they have to. Meta, Google, and Apple, on the other hand, still have consciences—or at least have enough stakeholders that they must pretend to. They do not actually want to profit from connecting ten year olds to pedophiles, but as long as it’s more expensive to fix the problem than to let it fester, they will, like most humans, let it fester.

What, then, would it look like to treat Big Tech like a black bear, and Big Porn like a grizzly bear? 

Black bears, recall, just want a free lunch, and if you make it too hard or costly for them, they’ll generally go elsewhere. These bears are generally shy and easily intimidated by loud noises, so it’s best to keep up a racket and, at night, perhaps set a tripwire that will set off an alarm. If you’re dealing with an unusually stubborn or aggressive bear, you just need to inflict enough pain to make it rethink its strategy—a well-aimed can of bear spray or even a few BB gun pellets will suffice; you don’t need the proverbial “silver bullet.” 

When it comes to digital childhood safety, advocates have in the past been hampered by divided strategy and the search for a silver bullet. Is it legislation like the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which imposes a duty of care on the major tech platforms and seeks to regulate exploitative design elements? Is it the App Store Accountability Act (ASAA), with its stipulation that Google and Apple verify the ages of smartphone users and require parental consent anytime a minor account attempts to download an app or make an in-app purchase? Is it legislation like the Kids Off Social Media Act, which bans platforms from allowing under-13s to create accounts and regulates accounts for 13-17-year-olds? Is it perhaps mandatory device filter legislation that would have iPhones and Androids turn on strict parental controls by default for minors’ phones? And, when it comes to determining the user’s age, should platforms and devices be required to use biometric age verification, or can they use the copious data they already have to estimate user age? Should we expose these companies to private rights of action, citizen suits, AG enforcement, or FTC investigations? 

The simple answer is “Yes.” The consensus from this month’s Age Verification Summit when it came to reining in Big Tech was, “let a thousand flowers bloom”—or “let a thousand BBs fire.” Legislation making it harder to collect and monetize children’s data, like suspending your campsite dinner from a tree branch, may encourage these black bears to look for an easier meal. Frightening them off with loud and relentless negative publicity may send them packing, and if not, a barrage of litigation from every angle, like stinging BB gun pellets, will soon have them rethinking their cost/benefit calculus. 

Up till now, Big Tech has triumphed by dividing and conquering—pitting conservative child safety advocates against progressive ones, pitting parents against regulators, pitting different model bills against one another. In their opposition to KOSA, however, tech lobbyists persuaded some progressive lawmakers that it would censor LGBTQ+ content, while telling conservatives that it would empower big government and undermine parents’ rights. With a well-executed “all of the above” strategy, we can begin to turn the tables. After all, no love is lost between these companies, and their business models are not identical. Some will support one legislative model, like KOSA or ASAA, because it disproportionately places the burden on their competitors. Some will decide that the litigation is getting too hot and it’s time for them to cut their losses by announcing proactive age-gating mechanisms, positioning themselves in the process as noble, public-spirited industry leaders and seeking to shame their more exploitative competitors. This has already begun to happen over the past year with Meta’s announcement of Instagram Teen Accounts, Google’s new age assurance measures, and Apple’s “Helping Protect Kids Online” plan. All of these initiatives are thus far half-hearted and riddled with loopholes, but they signal a change in the winds. With court defeats piling up and legislation multiplying in the states, it seems quite likely that we are close to a tipping point—in which one major platform tech company embraces robust age verification to minimize its liability and demonstrate its ethical bona fides, and a preference cascade ensues as other companies rush to follow suit, establishing a new industry standard. Once this is done, further legislation can ensure ongoing accountability, close loopholes, and formalize best practices and appropriate liability regimes.

But what, then, about the grizzly bear in the room? The porn industry is not likely to be deterred so easily; after all, if sites like Pornhub are now, only grudgingly, removing explicit videos of children, they can hardly be expected to be in any haste to avoid showing explicit videos to children. Although SCOTUS-upheld age verification laws for porn sites are now on the books in half of U.S. states—and recently enacted across the United Kingdom—there is little evidence yet that the porn industry is ready to give up its most heavily-engaged demographic (teens) without a fight. Overseas porn companies, like WebGroup Czech Republic, which owns the #2 and #4 porn sites in the world, may simply refuse to comply with state laws, and even compliant sites will seek to steer users toward forms of age verification easily bypassed (such as by entering a parent’s credit card number) or toward VPNs, virtual private networks which can make it look like the user is accessing the site from a jurisdiction that does not require age-gating. An aggressive strategy will be needed to bring this uniquely exploitative industry to heel.

Thankfully, the strategy noted above for beating Big Tech will help pave the way. Till now, the porn industry has largely been able to hide its misdeeds in plain sight, concealed amidst the clutter of a semi-sordid ecosystem of digital bad actors. There has been a fairly continuous spectrum from mostly clean sites like Facebook, to edgy platforms like Snapchat and Instagram, to porn-hosting social media sites like Reddit and X, to dens of hardcore iniquity like Pornhub and OnlyFans—all of them totally open to children. When everyone is sexualizing kids, it’s hard to hold the worst offenders accountable. If, however, we can send the pack of black bears running, it will narrow and clarify our targets, and a growing barrage of age verification laws is also likely to intensify the public scrutiny of this remarkably exploitative industry. As one journalist said to me recently about the pornography epidemic, “Everyone recognizes it’s a problem, but nobody recognizes that everyone recognizes that it’s a problem.”

Once they do so, it may be possible to pursue a strategy similar to that which activist Laila Mickelwait has recently so successfully executed against Pornhub. In 2020, she launched the movement Traffickinghub to draw attention to the thousands of hours of child sexual abuse material hosted on Pornhub. After Nicholas Kristof covered the story in the New York Times, Mastercard, Visa, and Discover all stopped doing business with the site, forcing them to start deleting their huge troves of illegal content. After her continued relentless public pressure, Pornhub recently announced that all remaining unverified content would be removed by the end of the summer.

By isolating the porn companies, exposing their serial lawbreaking, and amplifying the stories of their countless victims, we may be able to mobilize an angry public to recognize that showing porn to children is also a form of child sexual abuse. Since no ISP, payment processor, VPN provider, or advertiser wants to be complicit in child abuse, we may be able to tighten the ring around the porn kingpins. Even grizzly bears, after all, will be put to flight by a united show of force. Add in a couple of well-chosen DOJ investigations and criminal convictions, and this scourge of American childhood may at last be defanged, or at least reduced to manageable proportions.