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Big Tech Could Stop the Spread of Child Abuse Images. Why Doesn’t It?

Award-winning investigative reporter Robert Cribb says the technology already exists. The will does not

Earlier this year, the Investigative Journalism Bureau (IJB), an independent investigative team lead by veteran journalist Robert Cribb, received a Canadian Hillman Prize for its investigative six-part podcast series Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets.

In her citation, Hillman Prize judge Bonnie Brown stated: “Arachnid: Hunting the Web’s Darkest Secrets is an ambitious, eye-opening, and ultimately outrage-inducing investigation into the online proliferation of child sexual abuse material.”

“We don’t like to talk about this subject,” Brown continued. “Most of us would rather look away. But the sexual abuse of children, and the online transmission of images of that abuse is a global epidemic. It is fueled by the internet, and only escalating. And as we have recently come to learn, these crimes are perpetrated in all corners of society.”

Recently, I caught up with Cribb to talk about how his team tackles these long-haul investigations, what it takes to get to the bottom of a story, and how this independent investigative outfit manages to navigate the turbulence of media consolidation, shrinking budgets, and massive technological disruption.

While most people agree that investigative pieces are extremely valuable to our society, there are fewer and fewer investigative journalists. Why do you think that is?

Investigative reporting is often the first budget line item to be crossed out. It’s expensive, time consuming, and legally fraught. Any good newsroom accountant looking for cost savings will ask why a reporter would be given weeks or months to produce a story when that reporter could be churning out three stories a day for the daily news cycle. So it’s no surprise that the number of newsrooms with an investigative team—or even a single, dedicated investigative reporter—has declined to a handful in Canada over the past two decades. That intractable trend line is what first got me thinking about alternative models years ago.

What triggers an investigation at the IJB?

The answer is as complicated as the range of investigations we do. Sometimes, ideas come from observations in our own lives that prompt questions about the broader implications for our city or our country. Sometimes, it’s a small story buried at the back of the newspaper about an interesting incident that happened to one person and wondering whether it was a one-off anecdote or might be a signal pointing to a much larger, systemic issue impacting hundreds or thousands of people. And then, of course, there are tips.

When you do this work long enough, people in possession of unique, hidden pieces of information will bring them forward. Sometimes, they........

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