Something STRANGE Is Happening On Etsy *ALLEGEDLY*

From Wired:

For people seeking out depraved content, it used to be alarmingly easy to track it down. “It was possible to go to a search engine, type it in and get exactly what you wanted,” he says. Hughes now leads a team of 13 analysts at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a UK-based charity which is responsible for removing tens of thousands of webpages, images and videos of child sexual abuse content from the web each year.

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The words used by paedophiles to classify, share and find abuse images are varied. Hughes says that some are obvious, explicit terms describing sexual acts or what is happening in images. Some networks of offenders act in plain sight. Last year, a WIRED investigation exposed how paedophiles were commenting on YouTube videos involving children and sharing contact details where they could swap other videos.

But the more sophisticated criminals co-opt words used in every day language to indicate types of abuse. For obvious reasons, the new keywords the IWF has identified will not be published. “Some of them are almost alien,” Hughes explains. “They don’t necessarily make a nice tidy word or phrase. They could be a collection of characters that don’t make an actual word.” He gives a hypothetical example of how common the phrases used by offenders may be: it could be something as simple a ‘purple cushions’, he says. The words and phrases used can often refer to the name of a victim, where content can be found, or a particular set of images.

“If you were to read something like that on a forum, where every other conversation is perhaps less covert, then we would take that phrase, do some additional searching on different sites and see if it produces results that give us an indication that ‘purple cushions’ is a phrase that people are using openly,” he explains. (He uses ‘purple cushions’ because they are an everyday object he could see in front of him. The phrase is just used as an example, he says).

The keywords that are actually used can operate in combination with other words to make them mean something. Multiple keywords can be used at one time to reference certain images or behaviours. “Sometimes it’s using them in the right combination,” he says.

The IWF’s list of expanded keywords are mostly in the English language, but there are also terms in Dutch and German. In 2018, the charity removed 105,000 web addresses that were hosting abuse image – 47 per cent of these were hosted in the Netherlands. “There were some terms that had been translated from Spanish,” Hughes adds. “These were some of the keywords that were acronyms. The acronym from one language, such as Spanish, was then used with the English language.”