Your fact-checks will appear here
Family of plants
Reporting suspected possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline or to law enforcement can and often does spark investigation...
Online platforms must report suspected child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to NCMEC’s CyberTipline under 18 U.S.C. §2258A; NCMEC then reviews and makes those reports available to law enforcement, and p...
The publicly available record does not include a measured “false‑positive rate” for CyberTipline reports; NCMEC’s role is a clearinghouse that neither verifies all incoming tips nor controls downstrea...
Law enforcement prioritizes CSAM cases based on risk to live victims and investigatory triage: NCMEC analysts flag and escalate roughly 63,892 of millions of reports as “urgent or involving a child in...
Police routinely use IP addresses as an investigative starting point in child sexual abuse material (CSAM) cases, and specialised tools can flag thousands of IPs for follow-up; but investigators do no...
Law-enforcement detection and reporting of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) surged between 2015 and the early 2020s — for example, NCMEC’s CyberTipline rose from about 4.4 million reports in 2015 to...
To charge someone with child sexual abuse material (CSAM), prosecutors must assemble evidence that proves the material depicts minors and that the defendant knowingly possessed, produced, or distribut...
Law enforcement does not automatically investigate every IP address that ever touches CSAM; investigators commonly start with IP-based leads but then seek warrants, subpoenas or additional digital evi...
When the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) forwards a CyberTip generated by an XAI-driven detector to an ICAC task force, standard practice is immediate triage by the receiving ...
NCMEC’s CyberTipline triage is a centralized filtering system in which analysts review incoming reports, assign priority levels (commonly described as tiers signaling imminent danger versus lower urge...
Reports and guidance in available sources show uncertainty about whether written-only erotic fanfiction depicting minors is treated as CSAM under law or technology used for triage; federal statutes an...
Proving possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in court typically requires showing the material is a prohibited “visual depiction” of a minor and that the defendant knowingly possessed or ac...
Arrests tied to NCMEC CyberTips often require multiple tips or consolidated CyberTipline records because the system produces enormous automated volumes, many reports are low-quality or lack jurisdicti...
Law enforcement can and does receive CyberTip referrals from NCMEC even when a public or provider-submitted tip lacks the original files or file hashes; NCMEC’s role is to review tips, add contextual ...
Generating AI-produced child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in 2025 is legally treated as a serious criminal offense under federal law and increasingly under state law, and the probability of detection ...
ICAC task forces report thousands of arrests annually—most recently "more than 12,600 offenders" in fiscal year 2024, after roughly 203,467 investigations that year . The publicly available materials ...
Platform reporting practices—whether automated hash-only submissions or reports based on human review—shape the investigatory value of CyberTipline submissions by altering the amount of contextual dat...
Law enforcement in the United States and Canada struggle to prosecute "access" (viewing/streaming) CSAM at scale because legal definitions, technological realities, and resource constraints converge t...
Tech companies and law enforcement primarily find people who view or host CSAM by matching content against known-hash databases (PhotoDNA, PDQ, TMK and others) and by using AI classifiers to flag nove...
Law enforcement “honeypot” or sting operations that involve child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sit at the intersection of criminal law, evidence rules, constitutional limits and sectoral reporting reg...