Bluesky partners with the Internet Watch Foundation to curb online child sexual abuse material

The growing social media platform Bluesky has partnered with UK-based charity the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to tackle the spread of child sexual abuse material. 

“This will reduce the risk of users finding illegal imagery online and hopefully keep the platform free from illegal child sexual abuse content,” the IWF told Euronews Next in an email. 

It comes as Bluesky, a decentralised social media platform that has risen in popularity recently, reached over 30 million users at the end of last month.

Aaron Rodericks, the head of trust and safety at Bluesky,said in a statement that the partnership represented “a significant step forward” in the fight against child sexual abuse material and that Bluesky was looking “forward to working with IWF to keep our users safe from harmful content and ensuring a safer online environment”. 

Bluesky will have access to the charity’s tools which include a list of online addresses of webpages known to contain child sexual abuse content.

It also includes a catalogue of hashes which are “a type of digital fingerprint that identifies a picture of confirmed child sexual abuse,” the IWF said. 

“Once an image has been hashed, it can be recognised quickly, particularly by tech companies who use hash matching to stop people uploading, downloading, viewing or sharing a hash of CSAM,” the foundation said, adding that the system could look for a match without seeing users’ content.

Record levels of harmful material

Bluesky announced in November 2024 that it would quadruple its moderation team due to “a predictable uptick in harmful content posted to the network" that followed the "huge influx of users".

The partnership also comes as this content increasingly spreads, with the IMF saying there were record levels of URLs last year containing child sexual abuse material.

“It is a sad reality that the insidious spread of child sexual abuse images and videos continues at pace on the internet,” Derek Ray-Hill, interim CEO of the IWF, said in a statement.

The IWF said that their analysts worked to remove over 291,000 web pages in 2024 because they contained child sexual abuse, an increase of over 5 per cent compared to the previous year.

“We are in the midst of a child sexual abuse crisis and governments, the tech industry and society need to come together to find solutions and tackle this issue as one,” Ray-Hill said.

One in 12 children in the world has been exposed to at least one form of online sexual exploitation or abuse, according to a study published last month.

Images and videos of child sexual abuse, including computer-generated images, can be anonymously reported to the IWF.