Who has blood on their hands?

Who has blood on their hands?
Fr. Shay Cullen
3 February 2024

“You have blood on your hands, your product is killing people.” This is the shocking challenge and accusation made to the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerber, by Sen. Lindsey Graham during a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on online child safety.

Parents beware, your kids are impacted for sure. This hearing follows the exploding child sexual abuse images that are proliferating on all platforms together with other harmful content through the telecommunications companies. Is it time to tell the Philippine telecommunications the same thing?

The many postings and communications through the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) on the major platforms of social media is causing sex-extortion, suicides, drug overdoses, blackmail, grooming leading to child rape, excessive gambling, scams, fraud and other evils. The platforms of social media are like crime scenes but no one is held accountable. CEOs of the social media platforms are being challenged to take responsibility and stop the crimes, abuse and harm that their products are doing to children and adults. They must be held responsible and accountable for what they allow on their platforms.

There is a rising cry worldwide for the US to do more to control and discipline the content and change Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This means the platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tic Tok and others cannot be held liable for what others post on their social media platforms. When passed, the lawmakers had no idea what that would do in time- unleash a torrent of hate speech, abuse and lots of evil matter and activities carried on the platforms and published and shared without accountability.

Senator Durbin said that Discord is one of many social media platforms that are used for criminal purposes. “Discord has been used to groom, abduct and abuse children. Meta’s Instagram helped connect and promote a network of pedophiles; Snapchat’s disappearing messages have been co-opted by criminals who financially sextort young victims.”

Responding to the drug sales over the platforms carried by all ISPs including the Philippines’ PLDT, Globe and Dito, the worst drug peddlers are selling dangerous drugs over the internet and delivered by courier companies disguised as toiletries and cosmetics and so on. Meanwhile, the Philippine war on drugs targeted the impoverished users like malnourished, constantly exhausted pedicab cyclists like Ben Santos (not real name) that spent 50 pesos for a sachet of meth or shabu so he could keep pedaling and earning more into the night to feed his family. Ben was accosted one night by an unidentified anti-drug hit squad and shot dead. He likely refused to give up the name of his pusher.

The real drug smugglers, traffickers and users are the elites living in high rise condos and getting their supplies over the internet through the offending social media platforms for their high-powered expensive parties and to satisfy their addictions. Many young teenagers have been enticed to buy fentanyl online through Instagram or Facebook and died. That led to the accusation to Zuckerberg that he had “blood on his hands.” So many have died as a result of crimes like illegal drug peddling. Who else also has blood on their hands?

How many thousands of young people have been psychologically damaged, groomed sexually and abused online by the sex shows they are forced to participate in to gratify the sexual urges of local and foreign pedophiles? The pedophiles entice and pay relatives of the child victims to sexually abuse their own children or neighbors to gratify themselves while viewing small Filipino children being sexually abused online. All this by live streaming over the ISPs and media platforms. Some teenagers are lured to expose themselves in sexually suggestive poses to a person they come to trust online but is an extortionist demanding money or sex. Some commit suicide.

This is allegedly what the accused priest Father Karole Reward Israel, now jailed and on trial in Cagayan, Northern Philippines, did. He admits the acts of grooming and sexual encounters but claims it was consensual yet he secretly videoed the alleged rape and sexual assault of the teenage victim. He then blackmailed her to continue being abused without complaining by threatening to expose the video online. Before the internet and social media platforms, this would not have been possible. The enablers of such crimes like the ISPs must be held accountable.

Thousands of children are victims of exploitation and many can’t pay and some commit suicide. All this online child abuse can be detected and blocked by high powered AI-software. The Philippine law demands that the telecommunications corporations (telcos) and ISPs block that child abuse material, even online streaming, by installing AI-powered detection and blocking software. Apparently, they are not doing it. The telcos say they are effectively working with the Internet Watch Foundation and blocking or reporting thousands of offending websites. 

However, they must install the powerful AI-blocking software that enables them to identify bad content, filter and block it and capture the images and report to the police. It seems they don’t install that software which some experts say would slow down the Internet and slowdown the fast- flowing money into the bank accounts of the telcos. The Philippines is a hub of such online abuse and it continues according to international police. The child abuse continues as reports are still coming in from the international law enforcement agencies, investigators and monitoring non-government organizations.

The case of three 10-year-old boys who watched child sexual abuse on a cellphone and then went and raped a six-year old girl shows the terrible effect it has on children. There are hundreds of thousands of child abusive blogs, websites and illegal child abuse images and videos passing through the telcos and ISP servers daily. This is an alleged admission of failure to take effective measures with AI software and start blocking the child abuse streaming and videos that pass through the servers. They could save thousands of children from abuse if they decided to do so.

Unlike the weak laws or absence of them in the USA, the Philippine law protecting children from online sexual abuse is clear and strong but it seems there is no government agency that has the courage or commitment to enforce it. Do they have blood on their hands, too?

www.preda.org