Hello, and welcome to Protocol Policy! Today, I’m diving into the hard-driving nonprofit that’s in almost every conversation about the safety of kids and abuse survivors online. Plus, lawmakers who are totally fed up with Amazon, the K Street crypto boom, and how Apple’s cash is the key to its strategy of mostly ignoring app store regulation.
Name, shame and tame
Have you noticed tech companies starting to capitulate in making the internet (slightly) safer for kids and teens? Me too. One reason they’re doing it is Frances Haugen. Another is international regulation. But don’t underestimate the role of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation.
You can draw a pretty direct line between NCOSE and some of the bigger recent changes to How Tech Actually Brings Us Content.
- Like, remember how Roku just banned a number of adult entertainment companies? That came after years of Roku landing on NCOSE’s annual list of organizations that the nonprofit thinks should shape up.
- Or when OnlyFans briefly bowed to pressure from payments processors to ban porn? NCOSE had targeted both the site and credit card companies.
- The group has also won court rulings that — at least temporarily — made platforms do a double-take about how much legal responsibility they face when users post content related to sex trafficking.
- And it’s a big driver of the Earn It Act, a fast-moving bipartisan bill to get tech companies to do more on combating child sexual abuse material.
The group has a pretty explicit strategy, including naming and shaming companies.
- NCOSE this week unveiled the latest edition of its list, which it calls the “dirty dozen.” The list includes Google, Meta and Twitter among those “facilitating, normalizing and even profiting sexual abuse and exploitation” as Lina Nealon, the group’s director of Corporate and Strategic Initiatives, put it.
- The companies didn’t comment on their inclusion, which Nealon said could be based on the platforms putting users at risk of everything from abuse to “objectification” by fellow users.
- NCOSE also works with state and federal lawmakers, has a litigation arm, does research that can include setting up accounts as young teenagers on various services and is happy to threaten to republicize campaigns against powerful companies when it doesn’t feel they’re acting with enough urgency, Nealon said.
Still, the group works behind the scenes with several of the companies it’s criticizing, Nealon added.
- That can mean bringing in survivors or using their testimony to talk with company officials.
- NCOSE worked with TikTok ahead of some of its changes last year, Nealon said, which the group then leveraged with other services.
- “We go to Instagram and Snapchat, and we’re like, ‘TikTok did it. Why can’t you?’”
Plenty of people in tech policy grumble that what NCOSE really wants is a conservative, censored internet. They say the group gets there with smears that conflate trafficking and abuse with misogyny and objectification, or even by casting consensual sexuality as grooming or objectification.
- Critics say the Earn It Act would undermine encryption, imperil the livelihoods of LGBTQ+ creators and make platforms take down more edgy — but not unlawful — content.
- NCOSE has also gone after the American Library Association, Netflix and the company that maintains the Domain Name System for basically all .com and .net websites.
- Nealon justified taking aim at all those issues together by saying abuse is of course worse than sexist name-calling, but “the links still exist.”
However you feel about it, the result is something I’ve written about before: the shift to a PG-13 internet.
- That’s why you have pretty much every major social platform looking to put in place some form of teen protections.
- Nealon said she hopes in coming years to celebrate content filters, easier reporting for survivors of revenge porn, more restrictions on porn generally and a norm of defaulting to safety for kids and teens.
“I feel like we’re in a very unique moment in time,” she said. “I’m sensing this urgency that I haven’t sensed before in terms of really holding Big Tech accountable.”
— Ben Brody (email | twitter)In Washington
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A MESSAGE FROM INTEL
As a form of distributed computing, edge computing enables processing to happen where data is being generated. The convergence of 5G networks with edge computing means data is not only traveling faster, but can be quickly translated via media, inferencing and analytics into insights and action, enabling new, ultra-low latency applications to come to life.
Thanks for reading — see you Friday!