US Congress introduces bill to force Big Tech to address online child sexual exploitation

A bipartisan group of US lawmakers has introduced a bill, Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies (EARN IT), to end a legal loophole that allows technology companies to escape liability for hosting child sexual abuse images on their platforms. The bill would also update federal law to use the term child sexual abuse material rather than child pornography to make it easier to investigate the origins of explicit content.

This is the third time in the last three years that this bill has been the subject of a legislative proposal. There is a growing, pervasive and rampant problem with distributing child sexual abuse images and videos. In 2022, more than 32 million CyberTipline reports containing more than 88 million images, videos, and other content of suspected child sexual exploitation were received by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This is the most ever reported in a single year.