Reports of online child sexual abuse material increased from 1 million in 2010 to 20 million in 2026.
Internal AffairsInternational
- Omissions
- The '20 million' figure is the European Commission's official statistic for 2024 ('more than 20 million reports of suspected child sexual exploitation' sent by online service providers, 'up from 1 million in 2010'); the MEP said 'today' (2026), but no 2025 or 2026 figure had been published by the Commission before the session date, so 2024 is the most recent official data he could cite.
- The European Commission's 2022 impact assessment (SWD(2022) 209) cites a slightly different intermediate value for the global series: 'from 1 million reports in 2010 to over 21 million reports in 2021' (reports of online CSAM sent by providers globally through NCMEC).
- The figure refers to reports made by online service providers (the series used by the European Commission in the context of the proposed EU Child Sexual Abuse Regulation); it is not the total of all CyberTipline reports collected globally by NCMEC, which is a broader series.
- Sources used are from after the session date in one case (EUR-Lex 2022 impact assessment and EC pages from 2025), but the data they report (2010, 2021 and 2024 figures) describes periods before the session date and was therefore knowable by the MEP.