The Internet’s Dark Underbelly Destroying America’s Kids

America has known for decades that its children are being preyed upon digitally at an industrial scale, and that the predators are overwhelmingly our own citizens.

The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children’s CyberTipline logged 21.3 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation, containing more than 61.8 million images, videos, and files. Child sex trafficking reports alone reached 113,500 — a 323% surge from the prior year. Generative AI has supercharged the nightmare, producing more than 1.5 million reports tied to AI-generated abuse material. The U.S. hosts more child sexual abuse material online than any other country, accounting for approximately 30% of the global total of CSAM URLs.

This trafficking is not primarily the kind Americans are often taught to imagine: foreign cartels smuggling victims across the border. Federal data and long-term studies of commercial sexual exploitation of minors show the perpetrators are 98.8% U.S. citizens — overwhelmingly male, with an average age of 28.5, and frequently someone the child already knows. Databases sit on evidence of up to 89,000 unidentified American child victims. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. IP addresses have been caught trading child sexual abuse material involving kids under 12. This is American-on-American crime via the online world.

Digital platforms host, algorithmically amplify, and profit from grooming, sextortion, and trafficking children while facing almost no legal consequences for failing to act aggressively. They rake in billions from ad revenue generated by the very engagement these crimes produce. Predators operate openly across Instagram DMs, Snapchat disappearing messages, TikTok, Discord, gaming platforms, peer-to-peer networks, and encrypted apps — moving kids from “friendly” chats to coercion, to live-streamed abuse, to motel-room ads posted on sites that generate clicks and dollars for the tech giants.

Big Tech ultimately benefits. Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act was created to protect a young internet industry and encourage platforms to moderate harmful content. But as technology changed, courts interpreted the statute broadly, and platforms grew into some of the most powerful companies in the world, that shield became something far larger than Congress originally contemplated. By 2018, lawmakers had formally acknowledged that Section 230 was being used to protect websites facilitating sex trafficking. Yet targeted reforms for child exploitation and trafficking have remained slow and incomplete.

The human reality of this exploitation is sickening. Tim Tebow laid it bare in testimony before Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R–MO) subcommittee earlier this year. He held up a DOJ database map of the United States blanketed in 338,000 red pinpricks. Each red dot represented a unique American IP address that, in just six months, downloaded, shared, or distributed images and videos of children under 12 being raped. The barely visible blue marks represented the handful of actual law enforcement investigations.

Behind every red dot is a real child — still unidentified, still trapped, or still forced to live with the knowledge that images of their abuse are being traded online. For far too long, the response has been inadequate. Years of under-resourcing have left federal investigators badly outmatched. According to Hawley’s office, DHS currently has only seven forensic analysts working these cases.

Under the current administration, federal enforcement has shown what urgency can accomplish. FBI Director Kash Patel’s Operation Iron Pursuit located more than 200 child victims and led to the arrests of more than 350 alleged child sexual abuse offenders in a historic one-month nationwide effort. But a successful enforcement operation, however commendable, is not the same thing as a permanent rescue infrastructure. An administration can prioritize enforcement for a term. However, Congress must provide the manpower, funding, and statutory backing so that rescue and prevention do not depend on a temporary surge of political will.

Belatedly, Congress is beginning to move. Rep. Laurel Lee’s (R-FL) REPORT Act, sponsored by Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and signed into law in 2024, required online platforms to report not only child sexual abuse material but also child sex trafficking and online enticement to NCMEC. The flood of new data is, in part, the result of finally forcing platforms to disclose more of what has been happening in the dark.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed into law last year, criminalized the publication of nonconsensual intimate images, including AI-generated sexual deepfakes, and required covered platforms to establish a removal process for victims. Recently, the FTC has been enforcing the law’s notice-and-removal provision, requiring platforms to remove qualifying content and known identical copies within 48 hours of a valid request.

But takedown is only one side of the fight. Once a child has been groomed, coerced, recorded, or trafficked, the crisis has already reached the point of rescue. That is why Lee’s bipartisan Renewed Hope Act targets the identification bottleneck by requiring DHS to hire, train, and deploy at least 200 specialized investigators, forensic experts, and analysts to the Child Exploitation Investigations Unit and HSI field offices nationwide.

Hawley has moved the Renewed Hope Act framework into the Senate’s broader DHS funding fight, giving the child exploitation measure a potentially faster path than it would have as a standalone House bill. The provision, included in the GOP’s DHS reconciliation package, the SECURE America Act, would allocate $108.5 million to hire those HSI personnel. By folding Renewed Hope into a larger DHS funding vehicle expected to move through the Senate, Hawley has increased the likelihood that the effort could gain momentum quickly and deliver resources directly to the investigators responsible for identifying unknown victims and pursuing their abusers.

Taken together, these measures begin to form the outline of a serious national response: report the exploitation, take down the material, arrest the predators, identify the victims, and build the investigative capacity to rescue children before their abuse becomes another permanent file in a federal database.

But the fight remains precarious. The government cannot simply fund the rescue of children after exploitation occurs. It must make digital child exploitation harder to commit in the first place.

That means stronger age protections, better evidence preservation, faster takedown mechanisms, meaningful cooperation with law enforcement, real consequences for platforms that allow predators to operate with impunity, and a long-overdue reckoning with Section 230.

Our societal sickness has mainstreamed pornography, sexualized minors in entertainment and fashion, and taught generations of children that traditional boundaries around sex and age are oppressive or outdated. Our culture created these predators, and our internet gave them anonymity, infinite reach, and an endless supply of victims.

Whether Congress is truly waking up will be decided in the coming weeks. Our children, the thousands waiting behind those flashing red dots, deserve more than another round of hearings and headlines.

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Bethany Miller is director of Communications at NRB, managing editor of The Conservateur, and a fellow at Concerned Women for America.