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In 2018, tech companies reported over 45 million online photos and videos of children being sexually abused, according to a New York Times investigation which called the problem an “epidemic”.

Project Arachnid, an initiative from the Canadian Centre for Child Protection (CCCP), wants to be part of the cure. The computer program combs the web for explicit images of child sexual abuse. There are over 11.5 million images on its database, with another 100,000 added each month.

When Apolitical met Arachnid in 2017, it had been running for a year, crawling the internet looking for abuse images and issued takedown notices to providers. But now the project is entering a new phase, one which could profoundly strengthen the ability of government and tech companies to combat child abuse imagery long term.

“A lightbulb went off in our heads,” said Lloyd Richardson, a Director at the CCCP, “when we realised its potential”.

How Arachnid works

Arachnid works by sifting hash values — like a file’s fingerprint — to check an image’s code for suspicious patterns. It processes tens of thousands of images per second.

When the project first started in 2016, Arachnid crawled the internet looking for abusive images of children. The crawling identified images of child sexual abuse and issued automated notices to providers to take them down.

Previously the images were only dealt with in isolation, and with notices then sent out to take down illegal material.

Arachnid still crawls the web, but since 2018 the program has complemented this with more targeted scraping. This stores and processes the data from the images, to see if it has a similar hash value to others in the database.

It then works to spot potential repeat offenders, making them easier to prosecute, and changing the game by letting law enforcement step in quicker — and with more evidence.

“Originally, we stored the images temporarily, until they were removed,” said Richardson. “Now, we’re storing them long term, to establish connections with the new images that are coming in — so they can be removed quicker.”

Cross-border collaboration

Arachnid works alongside a more traditional tipline, where citizens can use an online form to report images.

The project is also in the early phase of bringing other international tiplines on board; six nations are already signed up, including Colombia and Croatia.

The collaboration platform, known as Arachnid Orb, helps analysts to pool their collective expertise and resources, reducing the duplication in assessment time and increasing the number of notices that can be sent through Project Arachnid.

It takes time to get other tiplines involved in the project, including a complex vetting process to ensure tiplines are the right fit for the platform. Due to the illegal nature of the material, it’s harder to collaborate when images can’t be shared.

“The problem with child sexual abuse, with images, is that it massively pre-dates the internet. Arachnid is only just scratching the surface of the abuse that is out there.”

It’s not just sharing between nations that proves difficult. The dissemination of explicit images online is a particular challenge for law enforcement as illegal activity often takes place in encrypted networks or the dark web.

Even when laws are in place, and government and tech companies are working side by side, Richardson said that children themselves are scared to report online child sexual exploitation over fears that more people will look and find evidence of their abuse.

On top of this, the cross-border nature of online child protection law often requires enforcement agencies to reach out beyond their domestic jurisdictions. But of the 40 countries in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Out of the Shadows Index, which ranks countries on their approach to tackling child sexual violence, only eight have a dedicated budget to counter child sexual exploitation.

It’s no silver bullet

Tech can be accused of being a shortcut to success, touted as the only solution to stop child abuse above more traditional preventative methods like parenting programs. Richardson acknowledged this: “Arachnid isn’t a silver bullet, but a long term, complex solution.”

“The problem with child sexual abuse, with images, is that it massively pre-dates the internet,” he continued. “Arachnid is only just scratching the surface of the abuse that is out there.”

"We’re not going to solve this problem by throwing an algorithm at it"

Artificial intelligence, for instance, is often touted as the tool to finally remove these images from the internet. But it’s not that simple. “We’re not going to solve this problem by throwing an algorithm at it,” said Richardson, emphasising the value of human analyst interaction within the service. “If it were an easy problem to solve, we’d throw our hands up in the air and solve it tomorrow.”

Alongside its extensive algorithmic work, Arachnid relies on three analysts per image to establish whether it depicts child sexual abuse — some images may actually contain adults over the age of 18, for example. It’s a difficult, laborious job, which comes with a lot of pressure.

“One error and the red flags go up everywhere,” said Richardson. “It has to be perfectly vetted, and that’s on us. But there’s no onus on the people or companies who host this material to remove it.”

"I can’t emphasise enough how large the problem is."

To build better links with industry, Arachnid has developed its Shield program. Instead of waiting for Arachnid to detect the material and send a notice, companies can plug in Shield to detect abusive material on their service, which reports the URL to Arachnid automatically and speeds up its removal. Companies can gain access to the Shield program from Arachnid free of charge.

A global resource

Despite all of this, running a project like Arachnid can sometimes feel insurmountable. As Arachnid grows, its body of images grows. “It’s depressing in some ways,” said Richardson. “But we now have a better idea of the scope of the problem. I can’t emphasise enough how large it is.”

Indeed, the internet’s biggest strength is also its biggest weakness when it comes to stopping the spread of these images: it’s a global resource.

So rather than other governments trying to replicate Arachnid’s approach, Richardson suggests collaborating. “Rewriting Arachnid’s program is counterproductive,” he said. “Fund your own internal tiplines, encourage local companies to use our Shield program, and get in contact." — Emma Sisk

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