The Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB), in partnership with TVO, Piz Gloria Productions and the Toronto Star, is proud to launch a searing new podcast series examining the unspeakable crimes of online child exploitation and the David-and-Goliath fight to make it stop.
Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets is a six-part series that brings listeners into the internet’s seedy underbelly through the powerful voices of survivors, police, motivated child advocates and technology luminaries trying to stop the spread of illegal imagery across the world’s biggest social media platforms and protect kids.
Tens of millions of images of child sexual abuse material appear on global online platforms every day. They generate a massive audience. They make money. And the volume of material is constantly growing.
The children depicted in those images are real. Many are now adults, held hostage by horrific images detailing the worst moments of their lives, viewed and shared over and over again.
Confronting their own trauma, some are speaking out, advocating for change internationally and demanding stronger laws that hold tech giants to account.
Sage (not her real name) has been forced to confront the horror of her sexually abusive childhood her entire life. She is now an adult and a mother. But she was forced to move and change her name when strangers, who continue to view online footage of her sexual abuse, tried to track her down.
“These people tried to reach out to friends and family of mine and get information about me, what I was up to, and find out where I was,” she says. “At that point, my original abuser had gone to prison. I was thinking I was safe because that person was gone and couldn’t hurt me anymore, and then this started up with the stalking.”
Project Arachnid, developed in Winnipeg by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, is an internationally-heralded tool that detects and flags illegal images to trigger their removal online. But online platforms often resist, citing privacy laws that are fueling the ongoing exploitation of abuse survivors.
“Governments have failed its most vulnerable citizens by delaying or not regulating the internet,” says Lianna McDonald, executive director of the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. “Tech has basically played dumb. They’ve come up with lines to cover themselves, and they have gotten away with no accountability of the atrocities that they have committed against children and childhood.”
The major social media companies that responded to requests for comment – including Meta, TikTok and Snapchat – said they take the spread of child exploitation on their platforms seriously and are working to address it through technologies that better detect and respond.
Hany Farid, professor of computer science at UC Berkeley who specializes in image analysis and digital forensics, believes the roadblocks to addressing the spread of child sex abuse material are not technical.
“For 20 years, we have not been able to get our heads around the one problem that should be very, very easy to get your head around, which is children, as young as a few years old, being sexually assaulted and extorted and brutalized around the world. And if we cannot, as a technology industry, as regulators, and as a public, get our head around that, what hope is there for anything else?”
The first two episodes are being released today. Each week, another episode will drop. Subscribe to TVO Podcast Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secret, via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google, or your preferred podcasting platform. Listen to the trailer here and the first episodes below.
The Investigative Journalism Bureau is a non-profit, impact-driven newsroom telling deeply-reported stories in the public interest.