Fighting child sexual abuse online

Google Search makes information easy to find, but we never want Search to surface content that is illegal or that sexually exploits children. It's our policy to block search results that lead to child sexual abuse imagery or material that appears to sexually victimise, endanger or otherwise exploit children. We are constantly updating our algorithms to combat these evolving threats.

We apply extra protections to searches that we understand are seeking CSAM content. We filter out explicit sexual results if the search query seems to be seeking CSAM, and for queries seeking adult explicit content, Search won’t return imagery that includes children, to break the association between children and sexual content. In many countries, users who enter queries clearly related to CSAM are shown a prominent warning that child sexual abuse imagery is illegal, with information on how to report this content to trusted organisations like the Internet Watch Foundation in the UK, the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, and Te Protejo in Colombia. When these warnings are shown, users are less likely to continue looking for this material.

We have always had clear policies against videos, playlists, thumbnails and comments on YouTube that sexualise or exploit children. We use machine learning systems to proactively detect violations of these policies and have human reviewers around the world who quickly remove violations detected by our systems or flagged by users and our trusted flaggers.

While some content featuring minors may not violate our policies, we recognise that the minors could be at risk of online or offline exploitation. This is why we take an extra cautious approach when enforcing these policies. Our machine learning systems help to proactively identify videos that may put minors at risk and apply our protections at scale, such as restricting live features, disabling comments and limiting video recommendations.

In 2021, we launched a transparency report on Google’s efforts to combat online child sexual abuse material, detailing how many reports we made to NCMEC. The report also provides data around our efforts on YouTube, how we detect and remove CSAM results from Search, and how many accounts are disabled for CSAM violations across our services.

The transparency report also includes information on the number of hashes of CSAM we share with NCMEC. These hashes help other platforms identify CSAM at scale. Contributing to the NCMEC hash database is one of the important ways that we, and others in the industry, can help in the effort to combat CSAM because it helps reduce the recirculation of this material and the associated re-victimisation of children who have been abused.

We want to protect children using our products from experiencing grooming, sextortion, trafficking and other forms of child sexual exploitation. As part of our work to make our products safe for children to use, we provide useful information to help users report child sexual abuse material to the relevant authorities.

If users have a suspicion that a child has been endangered on Google products such as Gmail or Hangouts, they can report it using this form. Users can also flag inappropriate content on YouTube, and report abuse in Google Meet through the Help Centre and in the product directly. We also provide information on how to deal with concerns about bullying and harassment, including information on how to block users from contacting a child. For more on our child safety policies, see YouTube’s community guidelines and the Google Safety Centre.