On April 29, Senators Jon Ossoff (D-GA) and Marsha Blackburn (R-SC) proposed a bipartisan bill to protect children from online sexual exploitation.
President Biden officially signed the REPORT Act into law on Tuesday. This is the first time that websites and social media platforms are legally required to report crimes related to federal trafficking, grooming and enticing of children to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline ( NCMEC).
Under the new law, companies that intentionally fail to report child pornography on their site will be subject to a hefty fine. For platforms with more than 100 million users, a first offense would result in a fine of $850,000, for example. To ensure that urgent threats of child sexual exploitation are carefully and thoroughly investigated by law enforcement, the law requires that evidence be retained for a longer period of time, which may go up to a year, instead of just 90 days.
NCMEC faces challenges investigating the millions of child sexual abuse reports it receives each year due to understaffing and the use of outdated technology. Although the new law cannot completely solve the problem, it should make the evaluation of reports more efficient by, among other things, allowing the legal storage of data on commercial cloud computing services.
“Children are looking at screens more and more, and the reality is that this puts more innocent children at risk of online exploitation,” Senator Blackburn said in a statement. “I am honored to champion this bipartisan solution alongside Senator Ossoff and Representative Laurel Lee to protect vulnerable children and hold perpetrators of these heinous crimes accountable. I also appreciate the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s steadfast partnership in getting us across the finish line.
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