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A new UN treaty to combat cybercrimes would allow predators and tech giants to profit from the sexual exploitation of children, including through images created using AI.

These new threats are emerging while the United Nations launches a new treaty to address cybercrime, but the new treaty only addresses some of the threats from sexual exploitation.

While the new treaty calls for criminalizing non-consensual sharing of intimate pictures, it still allows for a broad swath of sexualized content involving children. For instance, while the treaty criminalizes what is newly called “child sexual abuse material,” this term refers narrowly to images of real children. The new term allows for child porn created through Artificial Intelligence. As is now widely known, AI images are shockingly real.

Such images, soon to be allowed by UN treaty, would still be in violation of U.S. federal law. Specifically, in several sections, the new UN treaty allows countries to de-criminalize virtual child pornography in all circumstances as well as private sexting by minors, even to adults.

The General Assembly adopted the treaty on December 24, 2024.  Now countries must sign and ratify it before it goes into force. A signing ceremony for the new treaty will take place at a Summit in July in Hanoi. The treaty will enter into force after forty countries ratify it.

Supporters of the treaty argue that legalizing sexting is compassionate because adolescents have a right to sexual expression. Some argue that letting pedophiles satisfy their sexual preferences with virtual material would make it less likely that they would prey on real children. And they say that dropping the term “child pornography” is necessary to avoid re-victimizing those who have been exploited. They call all this part of a “trauma-informed” and “harm-reduction” approach, based on new theories in behavioral therapy.

Regardless of the merits of such arguments, they would appear to conflict with the priority of law enforcement of preventing abusers from harming future victims. There is no evidence that such new approaches make law enforcement more effective. Until recently, U.S. Justice Department experts argued against it.

Moreover, there is evidence that allowing sexual predators to engage with virtual pornography leads to more child sexual abuse, not less. And anti-trafficking advocates are all too familiar with how underage girls are lured into pornography and eventually the sex industry through sexting.

A recent investigation of the Wall Street Journal uncovered how Meta chat bots pose a danger to children and how executives at the company deliberately allowed the chat bots to engage children sexually and to pose as children willing to engage in sexual acts. The investigation found that sexual predators and tech giants have a common interest in ensuring that children can be sexualized online.

Meta programmers were being pushed by the Meta executive suite not to impose excessive limits on sexual content, including involving children as users and objects, because of the high engagement it generates and the profits this would generate. As a result, existing firewalls to protect children were ineffective by design. Chat bots lured children into sexual conversations that eventually lead to progressively more explicit and degrading sexual content. And chat bots also posed as children who are willing to entertain lewd and even violent sexual behavior from their adult and child users.

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