Senator launches inquiry into 8 tech giants for failures to adequately report CSAM

Senate Judiciary Committee chair Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has launched a congressional inquiry into eight tech giants for allegedly neglecting to supply adequate information to a cyber tipline aimed at detecting the exchange of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) on their platforms.

Grassley said his inquiry follows reports from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) that allege the tech giants are deficient in their reporting of CSAM and data related to generative AI generally. 

Meta, Amazon AI Services, TikTok, Snapchat, Discord, X.AI, Grindr and Roblox submitted more than 17 million reports of suspected online child exploitation in 2025, Grassley said in a press release, but allegedly failed to provide NCMEC with important location data and other information on users and suspects. 

NCMEC says the tech giants also failed to share CSAM in AI training and did not report “sadistic online exploitation targeting children,” according to the press release.

The tech giants’ role in reporting suspected CSAM is vital to efforts to combat it. NCMEC said 81% of the reports received through NCMEC’s Cyber Tipline in 2025 came from the eight companies.

“For almost thirty years, NCMEC has worked tirelessly to combat online child sexual exploitation by attempting to persuade [platforms] to detect, report and remove child sexual exploitation on their platforms and improve the quality and substance of their CyberTipline reports,” NCMEC said in a statement provided to Grassley.

Many big tech firms “regularly tout the number of reports they submit to the CyberTipline, but fail to disclose that millions of reports lack basic information,” NCMEC added. “This leaves children unprotected online, subjects survivors to revictimization, enables sexual offenders to remain freely online and wastes valuable and limited law enforcement resources.”

Grassley is compelling the eight tech firms to respond to NCMEC’s charges and offer detailed reports on their plans to evolve their handling of cyber tips this year.

The press release said Grassley is “alarmed” by the information NCMEC shared with him.

The senator included detailed statistics showing how each tech giant worked with NCMEC in 2025. Findings include that:

• Meta turned over nearly 11 million reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC’s CyberTipline in 2025, but many of them allegedly contained “consistency and quality” issues which kept them from being useful to law enforcement investigators.

• Amazon AI Services submitted more than 1.1 million tips in 2025, but none of them could allegedly be acted upon because Amazon failed to provide location or suspect information.

• TikTok turned over 3.6 million reports, but allegedly consistently reported incidents that did not relate to child exploitation. TikTok allegedly told NCMEC they “are working on other high-priority items and could not commit to a timeframe to correct this reporting issue.”

Roblox’s chief safety officer issued a statement saying that the company is currently reviewing Grassley’s letter.

“We are committed to a productive dialogue with the Senator’s office and NCMEC regarding our shared goal of keeping children safe online,” the statement said.

A Meta spokesperson said in a statement that “child exploitation is a horrific crime and we work tirelessly to protect children from it, and to help bring the criminals involved to justice.” 

“We're committed to constant improvement and appreciate feedback, which has already led us to make some improvements, as NCMEC has acknowledged.”

A spokesperson for Discord said the company has a “longstanding, collaborative relationship with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and we remain in regular communication with them to ensure we fulfill our reporting obligations and support their important work.”

Snap issued a statement saying that it takes Grassley’s concerns seriously.

“We have taken steps to strengthen our reporting processes, improve data quality, and help ensure law enforcement receives actionable information,” the statement said. “We all share the goal of helping to protect teens online and we all want perpetrators brought to justice.”

A Grindr spokesperson said the company appreciates Senator Grassley’s concerns and “welcome the opportunity to detail the protections and policies we have in place to proactively monitor for, identify, and report CSAM to NCMEC.” 

“Grindr is exclusively for adults aged 18 or over, and we take preventing CSAM with the utmost seriousness, including maintaining a substantial moderation team to identify and ban accounts at the device level if they appear to discuss topics related to minors, and deployment of AI and machine learning technology to proactively identify and ban similar accounts.” 

None of the other involved tech companies immediately responded to a request for comment.