IT firm’s AI program deters paedophiles from searching for child porn by sending warnings to their social media accounts
- Internet searches for child pornography surged with so many people at home because of Covid-19 lockdowns this year; sharing of harmful content more than doubled
- A Singapore IT firm is using an AI program to send warnings to people’s social media accounts if they search the internet for child porn
Just before the Covid-19 pandemic began to sweep the world, Singapore-based anthropologist Angad Chowdhry was shocked when he stumbled upon Europol’s Stop Child Abuse – Trace an Object page.
Random images of objects were arranged on the website, including a comb, a tiny pair of yellow shorts, and parts of a bedcover and a T-shirt: all screenshots the European police network had culled from child sexual abuse videos circulating on the internet.
Europol wanted people to make contact if they had seen the items anywhere: any information could help police officers track down the abusers.
“We had been reading articles about the scale of the problem, but this page humanised it like nothing else had,” says Chowdhry, the 40-year-old co-founder of internet firm Quilt.AI, a technology platform that “converts big data signals into human insights”. He decided to work on a way to use the power of the internet to deter consumers of child porn.
Worldwide office closures, curfews and lockdowns this year mean millions of people have been online for significantly more time than they once were. The child pornography problem was vast before the pandemic hit, but the growth in internet use has seen it surge.
