Stopline report – Child abuse on the internet: reports have increased sharply

However, almost 66,000 reports could not be checked because the websites were not technically accessible, director Barbara Schloßbauer said at a press conference on Thursday during a press conference.

Of the approximately 24,000 reports analyzed, 47 percent actually showed illegal content. That was a “huge increase in previous years,” said Schloßbauer. The vast majority of content classified as illegally represented representations of sexual abuse of minors (11,169 cases). In 93 cases, a connection with Nazi reactation was found, the annual report showed. In 2023 there were only 22 confirmed cases. Schloßbauer and Stefan Ebenberger, general secretary of internet providers Austria, attributed the strong increase in the figures to a mix of causes: the Stopline registration office has become more known and there was a stronger awareness of the population. It is also suspected that detectors also use technical tools to search for websites for illegal content. The fact that the reports have increased is fundamentally good, because this also means that more illegal content can be removed “and that is the most important goal,” said Ebenberger.

Extra in February and December
Runs in the statistics were available in February and December 2024. In February, nearly 2500 not only received an above -average number of instructions. It was also unusual that much of the content in Austria were hosted. Because Austria usually does not count for the most common countries of origin. However, the 2480 reports on representations of sexual abuse of minors could be reduced to a case in which a platform with thousands of illegal content ran over an Austrian hosting provider. The reports came from the British partner Hotline Internet Watch Foundation, which had counted all images and videos as individual reports. All content can be removed very quickly, it said.

There was another unusual situation in December: the registration office received nearly 66,000 reports within a few hours. The information led to four platforms for sharing files, assuming that they come from a sender. The problem: the employees at Stopline did not have access to the platforms and could not check the messages. They tried to gain access and asked providers or platform operators to check the content, but were not successful. “There are also cases where we must acknowledge that we are reaching our boundaries and that we, as a private registration agency, are not getting ahead,” said Schloßbauer.

Countries of origin in Europe
Even if Austria is head of the countries of origin in 2024 by the Statistical Uitter, the Netherlands have been in the front for several years. Ukraine also has two to four years to the most important hosting countries. At the Stopline, however, it is suspected that it is virtual servers and that the infrastructure is not in Ukraine. Although the partner hotlines were very involved in these countries, there is the problem of “bulletproof hosting”: providers would be well paid in order not to remove illegal content and also accept administrative fines. It is very difficult to master this business model, Ebenberger said.

Homemade and ki-generated content
In the past seven to eight years, more content has also been found, from which it is assumed that they were made by children and adolescents. Although it was in almost all cases in the past, many young people were no longer afraid to post photos of themselves on the internet where they can be clearly identified, Schloßbauer said. It estimates the share of the content to about a third of the reports. A lot of education and consciousness – even with parents – these photos and videos can be further distributed. Even if young people create the sexual representations themselves, whether it is illegal to pass them on to larger groups or to upload them to platforms. AI generated content would also be a problem, but at the moment it is usually still possible to distinguish them from real photos and videos. If this is the case, the content is not relevant according to criminal law.