New Report Reveals Section 230 Enabled Exponential Rise in Social Media Crimes

WASHINGTON, DC–A new report released today from the Alliance to Counter Crime Online (ACCO), and supported by AAJ’s Robert L. Habush Endowment, highlights the exponential rise in public harms alongside the growth of social media. Researchers analyzed data from 1996, the year Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act was enacted, to present day and found an overwhelming association between the rise in serious crimes and toxic behavior to the increased use of social media platforms and addictive design features.   Across six categories, the report found:   Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) is more than 17x higher today than it was in 1998. As the number of American children and teens on Instagram and Snapchat grew, so did the number of Americans dying from fentanyl poisonings and drug overdoses. Between 2007 and 2021, the incidence of suicide among Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 climbed by 62%, and are now higher for girls than at any point ever recorded. Global rates of human trafficking have shot up by 10 percent on average since the dawn of social media. Reports of online scams have tripled since the rise of social media, with a 12-fold increase in lost money. Wild populations of multiple endangered species went into collapse after traffickers began using social media platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram to market live animals for the pet trade.
"These harms have grown unchecked due to Section 230 protections that allow tech companies to profit enormously with few legal restrictions on what they host and amplify, and how they design their systems," the report states. "Thirty years since it was adopted, it’s high time to reform the key U.S. law governing the Internet."   See the full report and accompanying video here .
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