Five Eyes nations release guidelines for platforms to fight child porn; US senators introduce a bill to remove Section 230 for failure to police such content
This lands after a decade of documented enforcement failure: a 2019 New York Times audit found tech firms and governments still failing to curb child sexual abuse imagery long after the PROTECT our Children Act, and the senators' new bill revives the liability playbook from the bipartisan Senate bill that would hold platforms liable for sex-trafficking ads — this time aimed at Section 230 itself rather than a single content category.
The Five Eyes guidelines arrive just as jurisdictions diverge on method: an EU law taking effect that December restricts monitoring of email and messaging, including CSAM scanning, while Washington moves toward punishing platforms that don't scan enough. Platforms are being squeezed from opposite directions on the same problem.
First-order effects
US-facing platforms lose the assumption that Section 230 shields them from CSAM claims — legal teams must now weigh proactive scanning and takedowns as a liability defense, not just a policy choice.
The Five Eyes guidelines give governments a shared benchmark, so a platform's moderation posture in one allied country can now be cited as evidence of negligence in another.
Second-order effects
Encryption-heavy services face a direct conflict: the EU privacy law constrains message scanning while the senators' bill and Five Eyes guidance reward it, forcing companies to pick which regime to engineer for.
Smaller platforms without dedicated trust-and-safety staff will likely over-remove lawful content preemptively, since the cheapest response to conditional liability is aggressive deletion.
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds, Section 230 gets eroded category by category through child-safety carve-outs, converting platform immunity into conditional immunity policed by whichever government sets the strictest test.
Global moderation rules fragment into two models — liability-driven policing in the US and rights-constrained approaches in the EU — leaving multinational platforms running different safety architectures per jurisdiction.
The trend: Child sexual abuse material is becoming the wedge through which governments convert broad platform liability immunity into conditional, enforceable obligations — with the US pushing via Section 230 threats and the EU via privacy limits and DSA enforcement.
A gross, cynical attempt to de facto eliminate end-to-end encryption and get the government's foot in the door to dictate private platforms content moderation practices, enhaloed by the pretext of “fighting child exploitation.” https://www.nytimes.com/...
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers introduced legislation on Thursday to curb the online distribution of child sexual abuse material and threatens technology companies that offer encryption. https://www.reuters.com/...
🚨EARN IT Act a sleight of legislative hand side door “sneak attack” on encryption. Designed to strip us of communication privacy & protection in digital era. DoJ is pulling a dark sky has fallen Chicken Little bait & hook decrypt for all to trap a few. 🚨 https://www.wired.com/...
Our updated story on the most serious attempt by Congress in years to stop mass use of end-to-end encryption. With @nanditab1. https://www.reuters.com/...
EARN IT is a hilarious sham of a proposition. Dont be fooled, “protecting children” is a wolf in sheepskin here. The real scary impact of this act is that it will provide the government a complete loophole around the constitution. https://techfreedom.org/...
The credulity is out of control at NYT, where an article on the introduction of a bill that's a stalking horse for undermining encryption gets the headline “U.S. to Hold Tech Firms Accountable for Spread of Child Sex Abuse Imagery”. Seriously? Do better. https://www.nytimes.com/.…
Clearly they've realized “let's coerce companies to abandon strong encryption so they can conduct warrantless searches for the government” wasn't a winning message. So they frame it as being about child abuse imagery. To start.
U.S. lawmakers announced legislation that would remove legal protections for tech companies that fail to police the spread of online child sexual abuse imagery on their platforms. A separate, international initiative was also announced. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Really solid detail here on the problems with the Byzantine EARN IT Act. It skips obvious measures - like doing things Congress and DOJ *already committed* to fight CSAM - in favor of a “ticking constitutional time bomb” that may make that fight harder. https://techfreedom.org/..…
don't be fooled by the ‘bipartisan’ nature of this bill. it's a disproportionate, opportunistic & ultimately dangerous approach to a genuine problem. https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/ ...
NEW: Two measures were announced today to combat the growing problem of online child sexual abuse: one a bill in Congress, the other an int'l initiative establishing guidelines for tech companies. Here's our story https://www.nytimes.com/... First, more about the bill... 1/
The disaster EARN IT Act has been introduced in the Senate, which basically forces tech platforms to offer encryption backdoors if they want Section 230 protection. (It's a little gross.) @thedextriarchy has the details: https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
Chairman @LindseyGrahamSC, U.S. Senators @SenBlumenthal, @HawleyMO and Ranking Member @SenFeinstein today introduced bipartisan legislation to encourage the tech industry to take online child sexual exploitation seriously. Read more: https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/ ...
Tech companies need to do better. The internet is infested with stomach-churning images of children who have been brutally assaulted & exploited. They suffer lifetimes of pain as photographs & videos endure online. https://www.nytimes.com/...
U.S. to Hold Tech Firms Accountable for Spread of Child Sex Abuse Imagery - https://www.nytimes.com/... if this is brought in, I predict it will be extended to other fields...