The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected.

The regulatory gap has created uncertainty for big tech companies, because while scanning for harms on their platforms is now illegal, they still remain liable to remove any illegal content hosted on their platforms under a different law, the Digital Services Act. Google, Meta, Snap and Microsoft said they would continue to voluntarily scan their platforms for CSAM, in a joint statement posted on a Google blog.

Privacy advocates argue that big tech scanning messages for child abuse threatens fundamental privacy rights and data security for EU citizens, equating these measures to “chat control” that could lead to mass surveillance and false positives.

“There are claims of surveillance or infringement of privacy,” Swirsky said. “Blocking CSAM is not an evasion of privacy. Free speech does not include sexual abuse of children.”