The National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE) turned down a once-in-a-lifetime donation from a Big Tech company after it pressured the center to stop supporting tech industry safety regulations.
The unnamed company’s starting pledge of a million dollars “could have transformed our work defending human dignity, protecting kids from online harms and funding our core strategies,” NCOSE President Marcel van der Watt admitted in a video statement, continuing:
As details emerged during an online call, the conditions were clear: Redirect our focus away from demanding real platform accountability.
Big Tech generally opposes any law or lawsuit that increases their duty of care for consumers or reduces the number of people on their platforms — in short, anything that impacts its bottom line.
The industry has also never met a problem money couldn’t fix. Companies like Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Alphabet (Google) often spend millions of dollars to sandbag industry regulations and child safety protections in private — often while supporting them in public.
It’s no surprise, then, that a tech company tried to bribe NCOSE. The center not only exposes entities that profit from sexual exploitation, but supports many policies that eat into Big Tech’s profits, including:
- Age-verification laws requiring pornography companies to verify the ages of their consumers.
- Prosecuting Big Tech and pornography companies for engaging in deceptive and unfair business practices.
- Laws creating new product liability standards for novel technologies like AI.
- Laws requiring companies like X to protect underage chatbot users.
- The App Store Accountability Act, which would require app stores and developers to obtain parental consent before doing business with minors.
NCOSE also supports reforming Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — an outdated law that grants tech companies blanket immunity for content posted on their platforms.
Section 230 exempts “interactive computer services” from liability for content posted on their forums. The carveout was intended to reassure tech companies they would not be sued for deleting offensive content off their platforms, as other companies had been.
Today, powerful Big Tech companies misuse Section 230 to avoid legal liability, not for moderating content, but for turning a blind eye to online sexual exploitation on their platforms.
This year, NCOSE modified their annual “Dirty Dozen” to support reforming Section 230. Instead of highlighting twelve exploitative companies, the 2025 report platforms twelve victims of Big Tech who lost their court cases because of Section 230.
If NCOSE and other advocates successfully reform limit the scope of Section 230, Big Tech companies would be forced to either change their exploitative practice or spend millions defending them in court.
Corrupting NCOSE would be a major win for tech companies looking to avoid accountability. But van der Watt had no interest in sacrificing NCOSE’s integrity for a payday.
“We turned [the company’s] donation down without hesitation because our mission to safeguard children and those who are vulnerable isn’t negotiable,” he continued in his statement.
“True change demands alignment with integrity even when it’s hard.”
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