Why can’t we just “shut down” child porn?

Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around:

At first glance, it seems like a solid question. Why can’t they? There are a few reasons.

Do you see much porn on Facebook?

The first revolves around who “they” are. When “big tech” shuts something down, it’s usually just that company removing specific content from their servers, like when Twitter kicked Donald Trump off their platform.

In these cases, child porn already isn’t a problem. Content moderation on social media is a huge ugly problem to solve, and those companies work hard to keep things clean and tend to do a pretty good job of it. I suspect you’ve not seen any child porn on Facebook or Twitter, probably ever. They keep their networks pretty clean (arguably to a fault at times, but it’s a tough job).

Bad stuff goes underground

The problem with stopping major problems such as a child porn is that it’s not published in a place that’s controlled by big tech. This stuff is often on servers in foreign countries where the local…