A recent panel discussion at The Catholic University of America focused on the ways that “Big Tech” — from social media to artificial intelligence (AI) — is facilitating the exploitation of people globally due to business models that prioritize engagement and profit over user safety.

The Nov. 14 panel, sponsored by the Libertas Council, an anti-sex-trafficking leadership group, warned that AI is enabling new and escalating forms of forced labor — from psychologically damaging AI data-labeling farms where workers toil under poor conditions training machine learning models, to massive online scam compounds in Southeast Asia that generate tens of billions of dollars annually by forcing victims to defraud others.

In addition, the panelists said, burgeoning technologies such as AI chatbots and virtual reality present serious new challenges in the quest to keep young people safe online — all within an environment where Big Tech has the means to resist almost all forms of government regulation.

“The reason we have the explosion of exploitation that we do is because, uniquely, the tech industry has artificial protection that no other industry enjoys. The tech industry is largely unregulated and spends hundreds of billions of dollars to combat even the slightest bit of regulation,” said panelist Danielle Bianculli Pinter, chief legal officer and director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) Law Center, which engages in litigation and attempts to dialogue with corporations on how to make their platforms safer.

Other panelists included John Richmond, president of the Libertas Council and U.S. ambassador-at-large to monitor and combat trafficking in persons; and Annick Febrey, co-founder and principal at the Better Trade Collective.

Pope Leo XIV has spoken often and clearly during his nascent pontificate about the importance of safeguarding human dignity in the current era of AI. In his first interview since being elected pontiff, released in September, Pope Leo warned of a loss of humanity in the digital realm and lamented that “extremely wealthy” people are investing in AI and “totally ignoring the value of human beings and humanity.”

“The danger is that the digital world will follow its own path and we will become pawns, or be brushed aside,” the Pope said. “I think the Church needs to speak out in this regard.”

In the face of these new affronts to human dignity, governments have largely failed to create effective disincentives for this behavior through regulation and enforcement, the panelists at Catholic University argued.

A multipronged approach to address the current problems involves imposing legal liability on tech companies, robust and consistent government enforcement of anti-trafficking laws, and a collective societal willingness to accept the economic “friction” inherent in decoupling the global economy from human exploitation.

How Technology Makes New Forms of Exploitation Possible

Technology platforms have become the primary vector through which predators and traffickers exploit victims, and the scope of the problem of child exploitation online — a multibillion-dollar industry — is almost unfathomable, Pinter said. In 2022 alone, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children received 32 million voluntary reports from tech companies of suspected child-sexual-abuse material (CSAM), comprising more than 18 million unique images.

A major issue in the fight to combat child exploitation and human trafficking is the relative immunity from prosecution enjoyed by tech companies in the United States under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, Pinter explained. Section 230 was originally designed to encourage platforms to moderate content while shielding those platforms from liability for user-generated posts.

But since its passage, Section 230 has been interpreted by the courts as granting near-blanket immunity to tech companies for content posted by third parties, leading to a situation where many platforms engage in less moderation, even allegedly leaving up known child pornography.

In 2018, the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA-SESTA) went into effect, which clarified that Section 230 cannot be used as a defense to shield sites that knowingly promote sex trafficking and prostitution, such as the now-defunct sex marketplace “Backpage.” But even after FOSTA-SESTA, Pinter said the tech industry still enjoys a unique protection from liability and has fought hard to keep it that way, with tech giants often arguing that regulation will stifle innovation and user experience on the internet.

An important step that the U.S. can take is to hold tech companies to a higher standard of liability — reforming or reinterpreting Section 230 to meaningfully change Big Tech’s calculus when it comes to allowing exploitative material to remain on their platforms, Pinter said.

“The internet is not going to fail; their business model is going to [have to] change," she said.

Other major modern threats include virtual reality, such as the much-touted “Metaverse” from the makers of Facebook and Instagram. Experts have warned that children who use such virtual-reality tools are at risk of sexual propositioning and exposure to inappropriate content.

AI companions — offering increasingly realistic and immersive forms of AI-based life coaching, friendship and romance — are increasing in use amid widespread loneliness and declining social skills and come with major downsides, especially for young people, as tragic recent cases of AI companions endorsing self-harm and suicide show.

In the face of this, many tech companies do have internal boards that make recommendations on child safety, but the leaders of those tech companies rarely take those recommendations, Pinter said.

Beyond the direct harms of Big Tech platforms and products, technology is a critical facilitator for forced labor across global supply chains.

An estimated 28 million people are in forced labor today, and the United States is the largest single consumer of goods at risk of being produced by forced labor, Febrey said. Tech platforms such as WhatsApp facilitate the recruitment of forced labor, and “geofencing” and GPS monitoring is used to control workers’ movements. In addition, many platforms such as DoorDash use opaque payment algorithms that leave workers vulnerable and often unaware of their rights.

To train AI models such as ChatGPT, humans must label vast amounts of data by hand. This work is increasingly outsourced to “data farms” in Africa, which operate under exploitative conditions, Febrey said. Workers are underpaid — or not paid at all — and often have to view thousands of disturbing images, including child-sexual-abuse content, for 12 to 18 hours a day with no therapeutic support, she said.

‘Failure’ of Government and Proposed Solutions

The panelists all agreed that a failure of governance in many countries worldwide, including weak anti-trafficking laws and lax enforcement, is contributing to the proliferation of technology-enabled exploitation around the world. The incentives need to change if the situation regarding trafficking is going to, Pinter said.

“We can’t expect corporations whose job is to make a profit … to go against their interests for altruism. It’s never happened. It’s never going to happen,” said Pinter.

“We have seatbelts and airbags because the automobile industry … [does] an equation, and the liability risk would be more expensive than the cost of making the product safe.”

Richmond noted that robust age-verification laws, gaining momentum in more states after a landmark Supreme Court ruling in June, are also critical for helping to keep kids’ eyes safe from harmful content and ensure that adult websites can’t exploit young people for profit.

At the end of the day, Richmond said, traffickers are rational actors responding to a high-profit, low-risk environment created by governmental inaction and abdication of responsibility. Richmond pointed out that many countries, such as Germany, frequently give suspended sentences to human traffickers, drastically weakening the disincentive to commit these crimes. Other examples of weakening disincentives include the fact that the European Union recently approved cuts to its corporate sustainability laws, which were adopted last year and require companies to fix human rights and environmental issues in their supply chains.

“There have to be disincentives to counteract the incentive to commit the crime. And that is where I feel like we are struggling. In particular, I think it’s where governments are struggling,” said Richmond.

He said: “Are we willing to detach our economy from forced labor and human trafficking? ... There will be losses, but the challenge of not addressing it means that the victims on the lowest rung of our community always suffer losses.”