Platform-specific CSAM intelligence: What happened to WhatsApp?

Author: Carolina Christofoletti

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During my years of CSAM Research, I have been confronting to some scenarios that I think they are, at least, something that deserve attention. And today, I want to share some of them with you.

One case that called my attention was a woman that was sharing CSAM somewhere in a social media platform and was brought to Court. Take a look what she was claiming, and take her seriously: “I knew that this material was produced here in the community, and criminals dominate this area. If I myself reported it to the police, I would be killed. So, I was sharing so that someone could either recognize the victim or report it to the police”.

The other one is a highly interesting one. As soon as WhatsApp started with the sticker’s features, sexual stickers started to appear everywhere. CSAM stickers did not stay out, and they started appearing, curiously, with the very same contextual claim Facebook was doing with this year with their Research Team (“not intentional sharing”, what is an absurd claim from a legal point of view and from a research one also). Without entering deeply into that, let us go to my purpose with this article today: WhatsApp data, so.

During the beginning of this week and the end of the last one, I went for my hunt on a very specific data: CSAM reports on WhatsApp. Not from WhatsApp, but on WhatsApp. Remember the first case I told you about. How many people are finding those type of activities there and really reporting police or hotlines? What is happening to the CSAM report engagement on those platforms?

I got surprised with the answer what I got: Either a we do not have this data, or a we do not have how to crawl this database because there is no “database” to consult. Triple highlight that.

So, I decided to look for it in courts, looking still for the point where “intelligence” activity was missed. I choose a State Court of Appeals as a matter of “where those cases concentrate”. In my case, I choose São Paulo’s Court.

With search query conducted São Paulo’s State Court of Justice (Court of Appeal) website, I could find 54 results that matched my search “pornografia infantil” e “Whatsapp” (child pornography AND WhatsApp). For methodological purposes, take as a research note that this query was conducted online, 26 May 2021, between 07:30 and 9:00 AM, Brasília time.

Keep in mind that, if things appeared to the Court of Justice, we are talking about things that have, at least, a high probability of matching the legal criteria of a criminal offence. More than that, in my case, my 10 first results had the legal nature of a defensive claim (Criminal Appeal, Habeas Corpus and a single Civil Appeal).

As a matter of law, all those criminal procedures run in justice secrecy, reason why what we know about them is, most of the time, general circumstances of what is going on, provided that the information that is being released (like platforms where this was being traded) has any legal value whatsoever. That means, for research purposes, that knowing what criminal mechanics are from seeing those Court documents is an incredibly hard task and which, for lack of explanatory data, invalidates, most of the times any “gang mechanic” one wants to derive from this search. Who holds this “gang and mechanics” data is not, at the end of the day, courts, and CSAM researchers are aware about that.

Being aware that I am looking at the wrong place, I decided to insist, still, the sole dataset I had: My court dataset. And data started to appear, timidly, there. I decided so to open and read the 10 first court reports that were at my disposal, from 54 ones. Remember that I am only seeing, for exemplification purposes, São Paulo’s court data, but the rest of Brazil is still existent and maybe with similar data.

The first had nothing to do with, the second was a CSAM club on WhatsApp case, the third was a CSAM club on WhatsApp case, the fourth had nothing to do with, the fifth had nothing to do with, the sixth was a CSAM club on WhatsApp, the seventh was a CSAM sharing on WhatsApp, the eighth is a CSAM group removal (Club Penguin read as CSAM) and a must-read for the corporate defence that appeared here (civil procedure), the ninth had nothing to do with, the tenth was a CSAM club on WhatsApp.

Even if WhatsApp industry report data (1) is missing (read about it here) and WhatsApp CSAM alerts coming from public never enter any Transparency Reports (2), criminals exploring WhatsApp to trade/share CSAM are being disclosed by the Brazilian Police, and they are being brought to court (3), and with condemnations. Condemnations whose intelligence data was, probably, missed in the “no data” chaos.

But this court dataset, without its proper timeline (1+2), is necessarily a partial one: Without knowing the number of CSAM reports related to WhatsApp that never came to be investigated or whose investigation was stopped or even never opened because of a lack of information of any kind (1) and what the successful investigations had (2), we cannot conclude anything about CSAM law enforcement operations in WhatsApp in Brazil.

WhatsApp CSAM crime mechanics data, which may be an important disruption point for CSAM clubs in the country and in the world, is currently tucked away in a dusty drawer somewhere (intelligence hub) in a police station, CSAM hotline or court, somewhere. We need a WhatsApp big picture, and with urgency! And WhatsApp need it too… as a matter of Trust & Safety policy that can be seen as something adequate to deal with the CSAM problem in an end-to-end encrypted platform.

 More than that, we need to figure out what is going on with the CSAM whistleblowers there and how to engage them. Have you ever asked yourself why a third-part Report Channel, URL and information only has a greater chance to get a CSAM report in WhatsApp then WhatsApp itself? Have you ever asked yourself why reports about things going on in WhatsApp usually came in the form of the “somebody told me” history? Have you ever asked yourself how important CSAM whistleblowers, that knew exactly where the problem was, could speed things if only… we brought them to cooperate meaningfully with law enforcement authorities?

 Think, carefully, about it.