Social media law expert sounds alarm on child porn distribution on WhatsApp, Instagram in SA

CAPE TOWN - Following an urgent application by the Digital Law Company, the Johannesburg High Court has ordered Meta Platforms to shut down a number of anonymous Instagram accounts and WhatsApp channels distributing child pornography.

The company's Emma Sadleir said that she started receiving direct messages last week from children who had been affected by the creation of various anonymous Instagram accounts and WhatsApp channels, which had huge followings.

"To be honest, I wasn't that familiar with the concept of a WhatsApp channel, but it is a platform for one-way communications, completely anonymous and anybody following the channel receives those communications and these channels, they are quite distinct from a group. A group has a maximum participant number of 1,024, whereas there are WhatsApp channels with literally 600,000 people following those channels."

Sadleir said that the children were being asked to submit dirt, gossip and rumours about other children at their schools, and to also share child sexual material like photos and videos, sometimes obtained in a leak or filmed illegally.

"There was an awful lot of content and we obtained a court order late on Monday night against Meta to immediately disable those platforms, to remove them, to ban whoever it is creating them, which they have done to a large extent."

Sadleir said the high court also ordered that all identifying information of the owners of the accounts be disclosed, but this order had not been complied with.

"They were supposed to comply by midday yesterday. So far, we haven't heard really anything from them except a letter from a South African law firm saying if we want information from Meta, we need to go and sue them in America, so the discussion now is whether we rush off to court again in contempt proceedings, to force Meta to comply and it seems that they're giving us no option at this stage."

She said that there had been some progress since they approached the courts.

"It hasn't been an entirely hollow victory so far, we know of seven different WhatsApp channels, accumulatively over 100,000 participants on those channels that have been removed. The Instagram accounts are largely deleted, and, more importantly, the person behind this has been posting references to the order and therefore saying that they're now going to only publish verified information. The channels have all gone very quiet in the last few hours now that the information about the court order is filtering into those channels and onto those group chats and platforms. So there has certainly been progress, unfortunately, too late for some children because we have been told of a number of children who have attempted or completed suicide in the last few days because they were identified or affected."

While there is always online harm against children, Sadleir said that she had never seen anything on this scale before, as over 1,000 photos and videos had been shared on these platforms.

"What is unique about this is that they tag the handles of the girls depicted. Ninety-nine percent of the victims of these accounts are girls, and they give her full name, in this class, in this grade, at this school and this is her social media account... It's targeted and there's a lot of victim blaming, and it is very alarming to see that kind of victim blaming, shaming, no remorse from these children... It's absolutely terrifying."

The Digital Law Company is aware of children across the country who have been affected.

"So, it's mostly been Johannesburg. All of the platforms use the same keyword, which I am not going to share because I don't want listeners to go and look for it, because a lot of the content is still available. We started off dealing mostly with Johannesburg and Johannesburg South. Luckily, we got the court order just as Cape Town and Durban were ramping up."

Sadleir said that the most important lesson for all parents, as learnt in the last week, was that there are some terrifying aspects to WhatsApp.

"I think a lot of parents give their child a phone far too young. If it were up to me, I would ban children in primary school owning phones outright but a lot of parents give their child in primary school a smartphone and they say you can't be on Snapchat or TikTok because they are dangerous but you can be on WhatsApp so you can let me know if hockey is cancelled or so you can be on your class WhatsApp group so you can talk to your friends. What we've learnt with the emergence of these WhatsApp channels is that the risk posed by WhatsApp, for me, as it currently stands, I would rather my child was on Snapchat, TikTok and Instagram before they had WhatsApp because of these WhatsApp channels. The scale of them, that you could have so many hundreds of thousands of users and how Meta seriously doesn't seem to care about what kind of content is being circulated."

Sadleir personally reported each of the channels more than 50 times each and nothing happened until the court order was granted.

She has this advice for parents: "Know what your children are up to, monitor how much time they are spending. Please don't let them sleep with their phones in their bedrooms, so much of this content is going down in the middle of the night. Children need to sleep, so you take the phone away at night, monitor what platforms they are on and speak to your children, and if they come to you and say they've come across dodgy stuff, don't just confiscate the phone because that means the next time it happens, they won't tell you. Try as far as possible to have open conversations with your children and educate yourself."

In response to queries from EWN, Meta confirmed that it had shut down accounts it was able to identify and that it had submitted reports in line with the applicable laws.

"We have zero tolerance for child sexual exploitation and are committed to ensuring the safety of all users on our platforms. We can confirm that the accounts we have been able to identify have been shut down and we have submitted reports to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in line with applicable laws. We will continue to engage with law enforcement and respond to valid legal requests."