Every year, the National Center on Sexual Exploitation releases its Dirty Dozen list, which calls out 12 mainstream apps and websites that contribute to online sexual abuse and exploitation. These different companies facilitate, enable, and sometimes even profit from the horrific activities that occur on their platforms.
But there is hope! Thanks to the eye-opening nature and viral sharing of the Dirty Dozen list over the years, real change has been effected at huge tech giants like Netflix, Google, and TikTok.
One note: Not all of these apps are popular with kids — 11-year-olds usually don’t have LinkedIn profiles — but you might, which is why we’ve separated the platforms out by those likely used by kids and those that aren’t.
The 2024 Dirty Dozen Apps & Products Kids May Be Using
Apple
If you’ve followed Bark for a while, you probably know that we’re not big fans of how Apple safeguards their products for kids — iOS devices are built for privacy, not safety. But one of the biggest reasons? They refuse to scan for child sex abuse material (CSAM). That’s not it though, as they also don’t default safety features for kids, which seems like the bare minimum that they could do considering the fact that iPhones are the most popular phones with teens.
Another huge misstep is how easily teens and tweens can find loopholes and exploit bugs in Apple’s Screen Time, leading to kids having next to no protections when it comes to online safety.
Cash App
This popular payment app makes digital payments easy, but it’s also become the primary tool used in sextortion and other forms of online sexual exploitation. Sextortion is when a person is threatened that their nude videos or photos will be released unless they:
- Provide valuables or money
- Release more sexual photos or videos
- Perform sexual acts
- Other acts that are against one’s will
But why is Cash App the leader and not, say, Venmo or Zelle? According to the Dirty Dozen List 2024, it’s because of the app’s anonymity and quick transfer capabilities, along with a lack of meaningful age and identity verification. These appeal to bad actors looking to get quick payments for illegal activity.
Spotify
We’ve been telling parents for a while now that Spotify has a porn problem, and it only seems to have gotten worse. From playlists of explicit sexual sounds and pornographic album covers to extremely detailed graphic content in easily accessible podcasts, there are a ton of dangers facing kids on this streaming music app. There’s even been accounts of predators chatting with kids via playlist titles and descriptions — a scary thought!
Discord
Discord is a huge — we’re talking really huge, like 100-million-users-huge — communications platform where users can text, voice, and video chat in rooms called servers. Kids like to use it for chatting while playing video games, but there’s a much darker side to the app where predators groom kids and trade CSAM. It’s also become a popular place to create and share deepfakes — specifically AI-generated sexual abuse deepfakes. Discord is simply not safe for kids, even if they stick to private servers. The potential for finding a completely inappropriate and dangerous server is just simply too high.
Roblox
Kids may love Roblox, the interactive gaming and design platform, but so do predators. There have been documented cases of men grooming and abducting children on the app, like this one and this one. There’s also wild amounts of inappropriate content in Roblox, from “condo” games where users simulate sex to virtual strip clubs. This is why it earns a spot on the 2024 Dirty Dozen list.
Meta
Meta — the owner of Facebook, Instagram, and the VR platform MetaQuest — has created some very dangerous playgrounds for kids when it comes to their apps. Instagram in particular, because it's the most popular with young people, has become known for sextortion, online predators, and exposure to inappropriate content. The company has released “parental controls” but refuses to let parents passcode-protect them, rendering them essentially useless.
Known as “the front page of the internet,” Reddit is a popular message board that features a vast amount of content for users to read, contribute to, and share with other people. But many parents may not know that it’s home to an incredible amount of pornographic content, and more is added every single day. In addition to porn, there are also subreddits where revenge porn photos are posted, sex traffickers communicate, and CSAM images are shared.
Telegram
Next up on the 2024 Dirty Dozen list is Telegram, a popular free messaging app used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide, and it allows you to message nearby strangers as well as join group chat rooms like the servers found on Discord. You can also use Telegram to share and store large files like videos or documents. The icing on the cake? The app features most parents’ biggest fear: disappearing messages.
It’s no surprise that this dangerous app is home to a wide variety of unsavory activity — some are even calling Telegram “the new dark web.” There’s CSAM, porn, sex trafficking, revenge porn, and tons of other extremely dangerous activities.
Apps on the List Kids Use Less Often, But Are Important to Still Know About
Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a tech company that provides internet infrastructure to a wide variety of websites, including those that facilitate sex trafficking.
GitHub
Developers use Microsoft’s GitHub to create and share code online, as well as gather to discuss industry developments and trends. GitHub is also a major contributor to the creation of sexually exploitative technology and a huge facilitator of the growing crimes of image-based sexual abuse (like revenge porn) as well as AI-generated CSAM, which is created using AI to appear indistinguishable from a real child.
More than a billion working professionals use LinkedIn to network and look for jobs, but the website is also home to businesses that facilitate and profit from sexual exploitation. Also LinkedIn is also rife with sexual harassment, with one survey reporting that 91% of women received romantic or sexual advances on LinkedIn.
Communications Decency Act Section 230
Rounding out the Dirty Dozen 2024, this isn’t an app or website, but rather a piece of outdated legislation. Misinterpretations of Communications Decency Act Section 230 give Big Tech companies wide-ranging immunity for any and all types of sexual abuse and exploitation they facilitate on their platforms. This is because the act was drafted in 1996 — a lot has changed about the internet in nearly 30 years. Until this act is amended, companies will never be held liable for the harms their platforms pose to kids and adults alike.
How Bark Can Help
Fortunately, Bark monitors many of the apps on the Dirty Dozen 2024 list for potential dangers, helping parents stay one step ahead of issues like inappropriate content, online predators, and more. You can check out exactly what — and how it differs on different types of devices — on the What Bark Monitors page.
You can also use Bark to block any of these apps/sites that you may want to keep your child from visiting, which helps you shield them from some of the darkest content the web has to offer. With Bark’s comprehensive tools, you can customize how your child accesses the digital world, all while fostering a safer environment for them to explore and grow.
Check out our groundbreaking Bark Phone or start a free, one-week trial of the Bark Premium app to see how it works.
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