NCMEC funding — and what happens next

I'm Alice Hunsberger. Trust & Safety Insider is my weekly rundown on the topics, industry trends and workplace strategies that trust and safety professionals need to know about to do their job.

This week, I was all set to write about transparency reports when I read the news that funding for the National Center for Missing and Endangered Kids (NCMEC) was being threatened over mentions of LGBTQ+ kids in their reports. It's not a surprise, given that this is happening across all government-funded organisations, but it's still completely horrific. In today's T&S Insider, I talk about what happened, and what we can do to support trans youth and other vulnerable groups like them.

Get in touch if you'd like your questions answered or just want to share your feedback. Here we go! — Alice

What the NCMEC news means for T&S

The memories of child abuse cases I've worked on haunt me at night. I won’t go into them for obvious reasons but it is an unfortunate side-effect of a 15-year career in Trust & Safety. I know many EiM readers will have had similar experiences. 

That said, some of the proudest moments of my career are the times that I was able to forward situations of imminent abuse to the National Center for Missing and Endangered Children (NCMEC), and received a follow-up: this person was arrested, thanks to you. Luckily, there are many others with stories like this too. For those of us who have worked at platforms on child safety cases, we can sleep at night because we know that NCMEC is there for us to hand cases off to.

For those not familiar, NCMEC is a non-profit founded in 1984 by the United States Congress. NCMEC operates the Cybertipline, the central clearinghouse for child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and child endangerment cases which online platforms are legally mandated to report. NCMEC takes these reports, prioritises them, and then passes them on to the appropriate law enforcement agency. NCMEC also does a lot of work to help find missing children and assist abused or trafficked children. 

It’s for this reason that I was devastated to read that the US Justice Department had informed NCMEC last week that it would pull its entire funding unless it removed all public references to LGBTQ+ issues and start deadnaming trans kids. Quoting from Techdirt:

If NCMEC loses funding, we’re looking at the collapse of a legally mandated reporting system that processes millions of reports annually. Every tech platform, from the smallest startup to the largest social media giant, relies on this infrastructure to comply with federal law. Without it, we’d effectively create a massive regulatory black hole in online child protection. And, in effect, this would create a world in which CSAM creators and sharers would have free rein, as the key bit of infrastructure in stopping them would be wiped out..... And why? Because they’re so obsessed with what genitals anyone has (which is none of their fucking business) that they’re trying to wipe out the very idea of transgenderism existing.

Now, NCMEC isn’t perfect, and there’s certainly more that can be done to protect children, but one thing is clear: its work is absolutely critical for all kids. I cannot state that more strongly. The fact that it would be asked to erase mention one of the most vulnerable groups in the US to maintain its funding is horrifying. 

NCMEC appears to have complied by pulling three documents which referenced LGBTQ+ kids, according to The Verge, “including a report on missing children with suicidal tendencies, a report on male victims of child sex trafficking, and an overall data analysis of children missing from care”. I don’t blame them for doing so but there will 100% be implications for all children online and for vulnerable children in particular. 

LGBTQ+ children without NCMEC 

All children are vulnerable to some degree but LGBTQ+ kids are more so. Here’s an excerpt from NCMEC's now-removed document on missing children (bold emphasis mine):

Nationwide, LGBTQ children are more likely than their non-LGBTQ counterparts to suffer from suicidal tendencies. This tendency generally held true within NCMEC’s data, with LGBTQ children overall across most demographics showing slightly higher levels of suicidal indicators prior to their missing incident when compared to their non-LGBTQ counterparts. In 2019, research by the Trevor Project had similar findings. In that study, 21% of LGBTQ youth who were children of color or Indigenous children had reported suicide attempts in the previous year.

This stuff should not be controversial. LGBTQ+ kids are KIDS. They deserve protection like any other children. And because they’re especially vulnerable, it makes sense to acknowledge that.

Again, this is personal for me. I was a depressed, queer kid in a small Southern city who felt judged and misunderstood, and I’ve got queer and trans family members who have unfortunately felt the same. I have experienced first-hand how lifesaving it can be for LGBTQ+ youth to be surrounded by people who support them and love them for who they are, in person and online.

What this amounts to is a systematic attempt to erase LGBTQ+, and especially trans people, from our society in a way that can only result in harm. Slate lays out just how systematic this oppression is:

Viewing these laws collectively not only sheds light on their motivation, it also underscores the breadth of the harms. If a person cannot obtain an accurate identification document, use a public restroom, gain access to public buildings, travel, obtain medical care, serve in the military, then they cannot participate in public life or our democracy. In other words, transgender people are being disenfranchised from society on a scale not seen since Jim Crow.

We are not talking about a rare and hidden group in the US. The number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ continues to rise: it’s estimated that 1 in 4 high school students identify as LGBTQ+.

Although the number of people who identify as trans is relatively small, it’s much more likely that a young person will identify as trans: among U.S. adults, 0.5% (about 1.3 million adults) identify as transgender. Among youth ages 13 to 17 in the U.S., 1.4% (about 300,000 youth) identify as transgender. So this funding cut has the potential to affect a significant portion of US children.

The slippery slope?

Trans and queer kids are especially vulnerable and targeted right now, but so are women, immigrants, and people of colour. And while we may no longer be able to rely on the US government (or government-funded organisations) to do the right thing, there’s plenty that T&S professionals can do to support the most marginalised in our society.

In no particular order, here are some ideas and resources that I keep to hand. I have included specifics for protecting the LGBTQ+ community to illustrate today’s newsletter, but many of the ideas can be expanded and used to protect others as well.

What platforms can do

• Acknowledge the problem: Platforms find it hard to admit that gender-based violence exists on their platform and to give teams resources and support proactively. According to Thorn, trans and nonbinary children are three times more likely to experience unwanted and risky online interactions than their peers. Platforms should be doing everything they can to promote safety for these kids right now. Here’s my big explainer on policy, product, and operations best practices for protecting the LGBTQ+ community.
• Clarify policies: Be extremely clear with hate speech policies about protecting trans and queer users. Generic language about “protected classes” isn’t specific enough. Don’t do what Meta did! If you’re looking for language, I’m quite proud of the Kindness, Inclusion, and Belonging section of Grindr’s Community Guidelines that I wrote.
• Bolster privacy controls: Users need privacy controls to organise freely and stay safe. If a platform has additional privacy options behind a paywall, now is the time to make them free – or at the very least, offer a free upgrade or trial to users who write in to request it. 
• Understand the scale of the problem: This goes against the privacy suggestion (there are always tradeoffs!) but where possible, use data to track the user experience of marginalised groups. It’s not enough to just track hate speech by category (i.e. how many LGBTQ+ slurs there were) – also track what is happening to LGBTQ users. Are they getting reported more than other users? Are they reporting more themselves? Are they engaging with the platform less now than they were last year? This can tell you where and how they need the most support.
• Partner up: Work with civil society to provide practical information for users when and where they need it. Include links to organisations doing the work in your newsletters. Donate if you can, and encourage users to as well. 

What civil society can do

• Fill the gap: pick up where government organisations have left off by speaking to and working with the queer and trans community to understand the challenges and realities of their erasure. Publish those reports! 
• Create coalitions: Bring together coalitions to have discussions in the open. Come to industry conferences and tell platforms what they could be doing better, but also take the time to listen to practitioners and understand where the difficulties are. Organise with users to help them understand the actual policies and practices of different platforms so that they can make informed decisions about whether they’re safe or not. 
• Give the benefit of the doubt: Remember that large swathes of Trust & Safety folks within platforms are your allies – we don’t always get to do everything we want to, but we’re often on your side. Not everyone in Big Tech is bad. 
• Explore decentralised: Experiment with open-source and federated platforms and tooling. Fund safety tooling that is outside of the platforms. 

What other organisations (aka vendors) can do

• Support the rollout: Make it really easy for platforms to do the right thing by LGBTQ+ groups. Ideas here include:
  • Train moderators on cultural nuances, power dynamics, slurs – keep them updated with latest news and ensure they’ve gone through the latest anti-bias training.
  • Create specific nudity labelling to allow platforms to moderate outside of the gender binary (i.e. classify genitalia separately from nipples so that platforms can moderate based on context rather than assumed gender).
  • For age assurance/face recognition, train models on gender-diverse sets of photos.
  • Create classifiers with contextual information that can differentiate between reclaimed and hate speech, and be incredibly detailed about how current your models are. 

If vendors put in the work, then multiple platforms can benefit with little effort and that’s a win for everyone.

Outrage fatigue is real, but the way to combat the pushback against LGBTQ+ children is to get involved and do something. That might something at work to help kids online, but it's also important to get out and do something in your local community. When you notice others doing good in the world, be sure to say thank you. Amplify and support the great work that organisations do to protect all people. I love the work being done by the Trevor Project, Trans Lifeline, GLAAD and Thorn, but there are plenty of others as well.

Also worth reading

‘DEI’ might be a blip in history—but the value of diversity and inclusion will persist (Wired)
Why? A look at how DEI conversations started in the tech industry, and where we go next.

To Stop The Coup, We Must Be Clear About The Truth: Two Plus Two Equals Four (Techdirt)
Why? This quote speaks for itself: "Once we’ve cleared away the fog of manufactured confusion, the path forward becomes clearer. Historical examples show that effective resistance to democratic breakdown requires three key elements: clarity about what’s happening, courage to name it, and coordinated action to stop it."

Megastudy testing 25 treatments to reduce antidemocratic attitudes and partisan animosity (Science)
Why? An interesting look at a range of interventions: "we find that, in general, different treatments were most efficacious in reducing partisan animosity versus antidemocratic attitudes, which indicates that partisan animosity is not a unifying construct underpinning the psychology of polarization and democracy."