European Union publishes final Child Sexual Abuse Regulation draft requiring detection orders and age verification

The European Parliament Civil Liberties Committee approved on 4 September 2024 its negotiating position on the proposed Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, which would empower national authorities to issue detection orders requiring platforms to scan for known child sexual abuse material and grooming patterns, and mandate age verification or assurance measures to prevent children from accessing pornography sites. The draft includes safeguards requiring judicial authorisation for detection orders, limits on retention of data, and exemptions for end-to-end encrypted communications unless a platform voluntarily applies detection, with final trilogue negotiations between Parliament, Council and Commission expected in autumn 2024.

Detection orders that depend on judicial process introduce procedural delay between the emergence of a threat and operational response, and measures that exempt encrypted channels leave the environments where much grooming and sextortion now occurs outside the scope of intervention. A cross-platform AI safety layer that detects coercion, escalation and targeting patterns within the conversation stream itself, without requiring decryption or access to message content, operates in real time at the point of contact and surfaces risk to a parent, school or professional as harm develops. Guardii, a world-leading online-safety platform and Meta Business Partner, deploys detection modules for grooming, sextortion, child sexual abuse material including AI-generated and deepfake imagery, age-inappropriate contact and cyberbullying across Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Roblox and other messaging services, reporting the shape and seriousness of a conversation rather than its content and enabling immediate escalation to the right authority when a child is in acute distress.