Arachnid: Hunting the web’s darkest secrets – Details, episodes & analysis

Sage is visited by a detective who spreads out his visual evidence. She is confronted with the reality of the global trade in the illegal images of her childhood abuse. She is determined to fight back and take on the ongoing battle to remove them. The podcast producers track down the unlikely team of a creative software engineer and a conscientious lawyer who invented photo DNA. The technology identifies and removes known images of child exploitation from the internet. So if there's a solution that's been around for decades, why aren't we using it?

From TVO Podcasts, the Investigative Journalism Bureau, The Toronto Star, and Piz Gloria Productions, this six-part podcast series follows the survivors' long-shot fight against the most powerful companies in the world to end a massive, global trade in child sex abuse imagery.

Ep 2: The Solution

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What if your worst nightmare played on repeat, over and over on anonymous computer screens all over the world. That's a daily reality for adult survivors of childhood abuse like Paul and Sage and many others like them. These horrific images of them as kids continue to hold them hostage. But they're fighting back and speaking out publicly for the first time. They team up with a feisty group of global sentinels to take on some of the most powerful tech companies in the world to combat the spread of the illegal CSAM material.

From TVO Podcasts, the Investigative Journalism Bureau, The Toronto Star, and Piz Gloria Productions, this six-part podcast series follows the survivors' long-shot fight against the most powerful companies in the world to end a massive, global trade in child sex abuse imagery.

Ep 1: Speaking Out 

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What if the worst thing that ever happened to you plays out countless times on anonymous computer screens all over the world? Every day, tens of millions of images of child sexual abuse circulate on global online platforms. The proliferation of these images is getting worse as AI technology and deep fakes create an ever-expanding epidemic of online child sex exploitation. The children depicted in those criminal images are real. Many are now adults held hostage by these disturbing images despite available technology like Canada's Project Arachnid, which detects these images and sends out removal notices. Platforms often resist action, citing privacy laws. But in response, survivors and a group of motivated supporters are banding together across the globe to protect kids. Confronting their own trauma, they are speaking out, advocating for change internationally, and demanding stronger laws that hold tech giants to account. 

From TVO Podcasts, the Investigative Journalism Bureau, The Toronto Star, and Piz Gloria Productions, this six-part podcast series follows the survivors' long-shot fight against the most powerful companies in the world to end a massive, global trade in child sex abuse imagery.

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Check out more content on parental rights:  
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As they fight to clean up the internet, Sage and Paul deal with mountains of notices that indicate an epidemic of illegal content like the visual images taken during their childhood. Big Tech leaders face scrutiny in the US Senate for how they are handling one of the darkest secrets of the internet. Meantime, the Winnipeg Arachnid team and their global network partners are vigilant 24/7. They pull out all stops to save kids in real time.

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Lianna has spent her whole career protecting kids. Inspired by Sage and her goals to help other survivors get illegal images off the internet, Lianna and her non-profit team push boundaries and create Arachnid, the mother of all web crawlers, to hunt down CSAM images in the darkest corners of the internet. But nothing prepared the Arachnid team for the firehose of what they found and that ended up putting the tiny Canadian non-profit on the global stage to take on Big Tech.

From TVO Podcasts, the Investigative Journalism Bureau, The Toronto Star, and Piz Gloria Productions, this six-part podcast series follows the survivors' long-shot fight against the most powerful companies in the world to end a massive, global trade in child sex abuse imagery.

Ep 3: The Evidence Catcher

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Australia takes a bold step to push back on Big Tech, setting up sweeping world-first laws banning children and teenagers from social media. It sets off a high stakes battle of wills and things get very ugly for Australia's e-safety commissioner. Paul finds himself face-to-face with his abuser. And we step inside the life of a tough cop who's spent decades trying to save kids.

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An episode from Click Here from Recorded Future News and PRX.

North Korea has a secret army of workers applying for remote IT jobs around the world. They collect paychecks, sometimes steal company data, and answer to a boss who isn't at company headquarters, he's sitting in Pyongyang. We hear about one named Kyle. 

Click Here podcast: therecord.media/podcast

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The relentless fight to hold Big Tech accountable ends up in the courts with billion dollar lawsuits against tech giants. Will the push to tackle decades of tech immunity help Paul and Sage who continue to demand justice and change to protect kids. With the rapid expansion of AI, the stakes have never been higher.

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