Dear Friend,
Greetings! At the National Center on Sexual Exploitation, we are proud to celebrate another month of incredible victories that YOU made possible:
The TAKE IT DOWN Act w
as signed into law by the president!
This law criminalizes the uploading or distribution of image-based sexual abuse, including non-consensually-shared or AI-generated sexually explicit imagery, and mandates tech companies remove the images within 48 hours of them being reported by a survivor.
On behalf of a 14-year-old boy in Kansas,
the NCOSE Law Center has
sued multipled pornography companies for violating the state's age verification laws
, and allowing this boy access to their harmful material. These are the first lawsuits of their kind in the United States!
NCOSE also launched
"Not a Fantasy" Report,
which delves into the ways the pornography industry exploits image-based sexual abuse.
Looking to the month ahead, we continue to push for legislation like
the Kids Online Safety Act
,
the DEFIANCE Act
, and
the NO FAKES Act
, which each address the issue of sexual abuse and exploitation in complementary ways. We also are
eagerly awaiting a decision from the Supreme Court regarding the constitutionality of Texas's age verification law
. The Court’s decision will lay the foundation, either for good or for ill, for protecting future generations from exposure to online pornography.
Thank you for supporting us in the fight against sexual exploitation. Read on for more updates!
Sincerely,
The Daily Caller: Tori Hirsch: KOSA is the Only Way to Stop Tech's Cruel Carelessness
"A 16-year-old boy dies by suicide after being
sexually extorted
by a predator on Instagram.
A 14-year-old girl,
bombarded
with pro-eating disorder content on TikTok, becomes so ill that she has to go on a feeding tube for months. A 15-year-old girl is raped by a 32-year-old man who
groomed
her on Snapchat," writes Tori Hirsch, legal counsel for NCOSE, in an op-ed published in the Daily Caller.
Hirsch calls attention to these tragedies because they are remarkably
preventable,
with the rights laws in place. Most notably, the Kids Online Safety Act is a vital piece of legislation that can prevent catastrophic instances, like the ones described above. But Tech is afraid of laws that would protect children on their platforms because it hurts their pockets.
"Digital platforms are dangerous by design," she continues. "
Technology’s Achilles’ heel is that the tech industry did not set out to design their products with safety in mind. The industry has primarily introduced products and platforms to great fanfare but then appear to get surprised by vulnerabilities that have caused harm to users, and especially to children."
📣
ACTION: Urge Congress to Pass KOSA!
Take Action!
The Right Track Documentary Premiere is June 13th!
"The Right Track," a documentary on the realities of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation in North America, premieres Friday, June 13th at Regal Cinema at Gallery Place in Washington, D.C.:
"Told through the eyes of those who live it, this unflinching film exposes the prevalence of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation hiding in plain sight across North America, and the fight to end it. At its core is the Survivor Model—a transformative approach that decriminalizes prostituted individuals while imposing strict penalties on the ecosystem that enables it: pimps, traffickers, and sex buyers. Through gripping narratives from survivors, advocates, policymakers, and law enforcement, it unveils the incredible courage required for survivors to escape “the life” and rebuild, whether off the track or out of the brothel system. It also sheds light on the critical steps needed to bring traffickers and buyers to justice, revealing how trafficking thrives not only in distant places but right in our own neighborhoods. THE RIGHT TRACK is both a call to action and a powerful testament to the resilience of survivors fighting for change."
Get Tickets!
Podcast: Busting the Myths of Prostitution | Reem Alsalem
In this episode, we get to hear from Reem Alsalem, Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls for the United Nations. We were honored to have her join us to speak at the 2024 CESE Global Summit, and this session is titled “Beyond Consent: Prostitution, Pornography, and Human Rights” in which she looks at prostitution as sexual exploitation and a violation of the human right to dignity. She also looks specifically at pornography and other forms of technology facilitated forms of prostitution as she busts 7 myths about prostitution.
Reem Alsalem is an independent consultant on gender issues, the rights of refugees and migrants, transitional justice and humanitarian response. She has consulted extensively for United Nations departments, agencies and programmes such as UN-Women, OHCHR, UNICEF and IOM, as well as for non-governmental organizations, think tanks and academia. Previously, she worked as an international civil servant, serving with the UNHCR in thirteen countries. During her service, she has planned, implemented, and monitored programs that served to protect persons that were survivors of gender-based violence, particularly women and girls.
Disturbing A.I. Apps Allow People to "Kiss Anyone They Want"
Meta's artificial intelligence tool is seeking to take AI to the next level with its "digital companions."
While Mark Zuckerberg believes this concept to be "the future of social media," some Meta staffers are still rightfully apprehensive.
"Inside Meta, however, staffers across multiple departments have raised concerns that the company’s rush to popularize these bots may have crossed ethical lines, including by quietly
endowing AI personas with the capacity for fantasy sex
, according to people who worked on them. The staffers also warned that the company
wasn’t protecting underage users
from such sexually explicit discussions."
"Romantic role-play" is one of the categories of social interaction offered by these AI bots, and the bots can even engage in live voice conversations. Meta cut deals with some celebrities for the rights to use their voices in these conversations, assuring them that their voices would not be used for sexually explicit interactions. The Wall Street Journal engaged in "hundreds" of conversations with the bots in various scenarios over several months:
"The test conversations found that both Meta’s official AI helper, called Meta AI, and a vast array of user-created chatbots will
engage in and sometimes escalate discussions that are decidedly sexual—even when the users are underage
or the bots are programmed to simulate the personas of minors. They also show the bots deploying the celebrity voices were equally willing to engage in sexual chats."
Read More
📣
ACTION: Tell Apple & Google to Clean Up the AI Risks in App Stores!
Take Action!
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