Facebook has been making it harder for random strangers to contact people under a certain age, so that may well help, and we'll see if it does. And we could probably teach teenagers how to remain safe on the internet, and give the support needed to not be too emotionally reliant on the internet. That might get you part of the way.

You could run TV advertisements to raise awareness about how abuse is harmful to try to dissuade people from doing it, but that might make the general public more scared of it (the chances their family specifically will be affected has to be remote), and more inclined to "regulate" their way out of the problem.

You could try to take more children away from their families on the off-chance they may have been abused, but what if you make the wrong call? That could be traumatizing to them.

You could go down the road of artificial child porn to compete with child porn, and robots which look like children, but I don't think the predators specifically are interested in those, are they? And that comes with some serious ethical issues, and is politically impossible.

We can't just profile "whoever looks suspicious" on the street, because people who are mentally ill tend to behave erratically, only have a slightly high chance of being guilty, but have a dramatically high chance of being harassed by police.

If we can get out of the covid pandemic, this may help. Child abuse is said to have risen by a factor of 4 during the lockdowns, and all those other things which were put in place to contain the virus. It's possible that stress from the pandemic, and perhaps, opportunities to commit a crime may have contributed to this. But, this is an international problem, even if the pandemic were to vanish in the U.S., it may still exist overseas.

It isn't terribly surprising that a platform like Facebook, which has a lot of children on it, would end up attracting predators who seek to prey on them. Fortunately, Facebook has been deploying a number of tools to improve their safety over the past few years which don't rely on surveillance or even censorship.

Statistically, there have been a number of arrests which have been a product of their activities, although I don't have much info on those. Someone else may.

The real question is whether it is worth sacrificing everyone's privacy, so that a few people can be arrested.

I can imagine iCloud being a lower risk platform than Facebook. Someone can't really groom someone into uploading photos, although the existence of such images is still very condemnable.

IIRC Wired reported the algorithm "PhotoDNA" worked around 99% of the time a number of years ago, however newer algorithms may be fuzzier. This is not the same algorithm. And even "PhotoDNA" appears to change over time.

I doubt reviewers of such content are at a liberty to discuss what they see or don't with anyone here. Standard confidentiality agreements.

It's like having hundreds of nukes ready for launch, as opposed to having the first launch being a year away.

If they wanted to "do it as all major companies do", then they could have done it on the server-side, and there wouldn't have been a debate about it at all, although it is still extremely questionable, as far as privacy is concerned.

We would all be better off without these things happening, and anyone would want less of it to happen.