How to Fix America’s Child-Pornography Crisis

America is in the grips of two kinds of child-pornography problems. The first involves the production of child pornography itself—the abuse of children photographed, filmed, and monetized. The second involves the remarkably early age at which children are now exposed to pornography, when they start to see the images that shape their minds and hearts.

Both have profound costs. The terrible toll of child sexual abuse requires little explanation. Many girls and boys who have survived abuse carry the consequences for a lifetime, and because of the almost endless ability of porn consumers to find, download, and upload the same images, survivors can be traumatized again and again.

The consequences of childhood sexual exposure—while in no way comparable to the trauma of those exploited—are also becoming clear. Women and men are reporting that their relationships are twisted and distorted by early exposure to porn, and that’s contributing to an immense amount of pain, exploitation, and heartbreak.

But our nation doesn’t have to consent to child sexual exploitation or child sexual exposure as terrible but inevitable “costs of freedom.” Our culture and our government possess tools to deal with these problems, and those tools are consistent with the First Amendment. The challenge is in doing so with enough creativity and pugnacity to take on a ubiquitous, resilient industry.

Child sexual abuse may be (almost) universally reviled, but it is also widely consumed, including on some mainstream porn websites. A survey of recent media and have uncovered thoroughly inadequate controls on child pornography. A Twitter plan to allow users to sell OnlyFans-style porn subscriptions floundered when an that “Twitter cannot accurately detect child sexual exploitation and non-consensual nudity at scale.”