Why would a file host still have csam up after i reported it?

1. Notification and verification lag: reports must be checked before action

Hotlines and enforcement bodies routinely verify whether a submitted URL is actually CSAM and route it through notice-and-takedown or law enforcement channels, a process that produces measurable delays; monitoring found 87% removed within 24 hours but noted that about 10% remained online seven weeks or longer after notification, showing that verification and processing time can leave content live for days or weeks ^[1][2].

2. Jurisdictional and hosting-chain complexity — who owns the content isn’t always the host

Reports may hit an intermediary (a CDN, reverse proxy, or registrar) that “does not host” the content and therefore cannot remove it directly, and governments and hotlines instead route takedown requests to the national hosting provider or law enforcement, adding handoffs and delays when content spans countries or uses chained infrastructure ^[6][7][1].

3. Technical and scale limits: human moderation can’t keep up with volume

Regulators and auditors have concluded that CSAM prevalence outstrips manual moderation capacity and that providers need perceptual hashing and automated detection to operate at scale; without robust automated detection and hashing, human review bottlenecks slow removals ^[3][8].

4. Legal and policy constraints shape how quickly providers must act

In many jurisdictions providers are required to report CSAM to central bodies like NCMEC but are not universally required to proactively search for it; legislation under discussion (and some proposed laws) would change removal timelines and civil liability, but existing rules create a patchwork where platforms may report, preserve, or delay removal based on law and policy risk assessments ^[4][9][10].

5. Defensive postures, evidentiary preservation, and law-enforcement referrals

Sometimes a service preserves content for investigators or delays takedown to allow law enforcement to collect evidence; public-private workflows explicitly send validated links to police or issue NTDs and may stagger those actions for investigative reasons, which can keep material accessible longer than a complainant expects ^[1][7].

6. Abuse, recidivist hosting, and compromised accounts keep content returning

Bad actors intentionally use compromised or repurposed legitimate hosts, rapid re-uploads, or “recidivist” services that relist material; watchdogs have described hosting providers that needed naming-and-shaming to change practices, and enforcement programs are specifically targeted at file-storage and file-sharing services where re-hosting is common ^[11][3][2].

7. New detection challenges: AI-generated or altered images and false positives

Platforms face new burdens from AI-generated imagery and deepfakes that complicate automated detection and legal definitions; companies that rely on hash-matching miss novel or synthetically generated content, and debates over “apparent” CSAM versus adjudicated illegality create grey zones that slow definitive takedown decisions ^[5][12][10].

Conclusion: multiple, often-visible bottlenecks explain why content can remain live

When a takedown doesn’t happen immediately it is usually not a single failure but a mix of verification steps, routing through intermediaries or law enforcement, scale and technical limits, legal constraints, and intentional abuse tactics — a reality documented by government monitors, industry transparency reports, and regulators ^[1][2][8][3]. Public reforms and better tooling are being discussed to shorten these windows, but current systems still allow a non-trivial share of CSAM to persist after reports ^[9][13].