 filter through reams of potentially illegal material, either reported to its hotline by victims or hunted down proactively. The foundation then alerts internet providers who take down illegal websites, which are often run by criminal paedophile gangs for profit. It also tags images with a special computer hash that means they can be instantly blocked if someone tries to upload them on the web again. Dealing with such horror on a daily basis is a task few would willingly take on. However, for Dan Sexton, the group's chief technology officer, it is a moral imperative. 'Everyone is here because they want to protect children,' he says. 'They want to make the internet a safer place. That drives people and pulls people together.' Last year, the IWF assessed 375,230 reports of child abuse content – a 4pc increase on the previous year – and found 255,588 of them contained illegal imagery, or were advertising it. It also identified over 1.6 million unique images of child abuse. Its team typically find a child abuse image every two minutes. But its job is getting harder, Sexton says. The surging popularity of private messaging apps that rely on end-to-end encryption – scrambling their contents so they cannot be read by anyone other than the sender and receiver – has made it harder to put a stop to the spread of material. And an even more recent threat identified by the IWF is the emergence of a new wave of artificial intelligence – so-called generative AI.){kind=link}
Wave of generative AI is making the Internet Watch Foundation’s job harder than ever
In a village on the leafy outskirts of Cambridge, an innocuous office block is on the front line of Britain’s battle to stop the spread of illegal child sexual abuse videos across the web.
Inside, a team of 30 or so analysts from the non-profit Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) filter through reams of potentially illegal material, either reported to its hotline by victims or hunted down proactively.
The foundation then alerts internet providers who take down illegal websites, which are often run by criminal paedophile gangs for profit. It also tags images with a special computer hash that means they can be instantly blocked if someone tries to upload them on the web again.
Dealing with such horror on a daily basis is a task few would willingly take on. However, for Dan Sexton, the group’s chief technology officer, it is a moral imperative.