Tech and financial companies must reimagine online platforms' design to restrict predators' ability to exploit children online, International Justice Mission's John Tanagho said.

Anti-child abuse campaigners and law enforcement have led the fight against online child sexual abuse — an emerging form of human trafficking — but the communications and payment firms must take back power from predators utilizing their platforms, said Tanagho, executive director of IJM's Center to End Online Sexual Exploitation of Children in the Philippines.

Speaking at the Singapore FinTech Festival on 2 November, Tanagho, whose experience in the field dates back before the emergence of online child abuse, laid out a three-point action plan for online payment and social media firms to minimize opportunities for predators to misuse their platforms.

"Livestreamed child sexual abuse didn't exist before the digital age, and it flourishes in the shadows, undetected, unreported, unmitigated," Tanagho said at the world's largest Fintech festival attended by over 60,000 attendees.

The crime, in which most Western predators pay to watch or direct live-streamed sexual abuse of trafficked children, flourishes where law enforcement is lax or under-resourced. The crime ballooned to unforeseen levels due to restrictions on movement during the Covid pandemic.

Platforms that inadvertently facilitate online child abuse have begun to acknowledge the issue — but must go back to the drawing board and rebuild their platforms, using data collected and lessons learned in recent years to make them "safe by design," Tanagho said.