Grassley’s Big Tech Investigation Yields Child Safety Results

Grassley's Big Tech Investigation Yields Child Safety Results

NCMEC reports Grassley's oversight of major tech companies led to "significantly improved" child safety reporting.

BUTLER COUNTY, IOWA - U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley's (R-Iowa) investigation into eight major tech companies has prompted "significantly improved" and "more actionable" reports of online child exploitation, according to a letter from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC). These improvements have allowed law enforcement to better respond to instances of child abuse.

"Following your direct outreach to these platforms regarding these issues, NCMEC is pleased to share that each of the companies have constructively engaged with NCMEC to significantly improve their reporting to the CyberTipline… more actionable CyberTipline reports are being submitted, enabling law enforcement to better investigate offenders and safeguard children from sexual exploitation," NCMEC wrote in a letter to Grassley.

In April 2026, Grassley opened a congressional inquiry into Meta, TikTok, Amazon, Snapchat, Discord, X.AI, Grindr and Roblox regarding the companies' alleged failure to sufficiently report online child sexual exploitation. In June 2026, Grassley released responses from each of the companies, which explained their efforts to improve reporting processes. In August 2026, NCMEC informed Grassley that each platform had taken "substantive measures" to address its reporting deficiencies as a direct result of Grassley's oversight.

"Protecting children online is a top legislative and oversight priority for me as Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman. I'm glad to see my investigation into child safety reporting yield real results, and I appreciate these companies for responding to my oversight. I also thank them for working with NCMEC to ensure every suspected incident of online child exploitation is detected, reported and addressed," Grassley said. "I'll always work to hold Big Tech accountable to the American people, and I'll continue fighting for commonsense solutions to safeguard our nation's children."

Read NCMEC's latest update HERE.

Grassley's original inquiry can be found HERE, and the tech companies' responses can be found HERE. A summary of NCMEC's update can be found below:

Meta

According to NCMEC, Meta submitted nearly 11 million reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, Meta has:

• Improved its reporting process to ensure reported conduct meets the legal threshold for CyberTipline reporting.
• Increased its use of report annotations to provide additional context for law enforcement responding to incidents of child exploitation.
• Resolved a technical issue that resulted in around 3,900 duplicate reports in 2025.
• Updated its training and escalation protocols for reports involving suicidal ideation.

TikTok

TikTok submitted over 2.1 million reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline from January 2025 to June 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, TikTok has:

• Significantly reduced reports of non-pertinent content.
• Implemented biweekly discussions with NCMEC to improve reporting quality and accuracy.

Amazon

Amazon AI Services submitted approximately 1.1 million reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025. After human review, Amazon determined 99.6% of the reports were false positives, and 4,376 were confirmed child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Following Grassley's oversight, Amazon has:

• Implemented human review of public-web detections to confirm instances of child sexual exploitation before submitting reports.
• Improved its CyberTipline reporting process to include source URLs, file names, reported files and additional contextual information.
• Conducted a comprehensive review of more than one million submitted reports and retracted false positives.

Snapchat

Snapchat submitted approximately 752,000 reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, Snapchat has:

• Implemented new report annotations to indicate minor-to-minor interactions, sextortion and sadistic online exploitation.
• Expanded use of reported incident types, including "unsolicited obscene material sent to a child."
• Refined reporting to provide evidence of an offender's knowledge of a child's age.
• Improved its reporting process to include additional chat history to provide greater context for law enforcement.

Discord

According to NCMEC, Discord submitted nearly 490,000 reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, Discord has:

• Reduced reporting of non-pertinent content.
• Improved reporting procedures to ensure relevant user account and location information is included in CyberTipline reports or made available to law enforcement.
• Improved its reporting process to include port numbers.

X.AI

X.AI submitted over 135,000 reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, X.AI has:

• Resubmitted previous CyberTipline reports with more complete user and location information.
• Improved its reporting process to include key subscriber information, including name, date of birth, email address, screen name, user identifier, registration or login IP address and profile URL.
• Improved its reporting process to ensure location information is included in the majority of reports.
• Improved its reporting process to include image-generation prompt information, when applicable, to provide additional investigative context.

Grindr

According to NCMEC, Grindr submitted over 111,000 reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, Grindr has:

• Significantly improved its reporting process to more frequently include user and location information as well as key subscriber information, including display name, user identifier, login IP address, port number, device ID, estimated location and profile bio when applicable.
• Resubmitted approximately 7,000 reports with updated IP and location information.
• Committed to resubmitting approximately 54,000 reports with additional location information.
• Established regular engagement with NCMEC and committed to participate in the 2026 CyberTipline Roundtable.

Roblox

According to NCMEC, Roblox submitted over 65,000 reports involving suspected online child exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline in 2025.

Following Grassley's oversight, Roblox has:

• Significantly improved its reporting process to better identify the child victim in incidents involving multiple children.

• Conducted additional training for reporting personnel.
• Increased its use of report annotations to provide additional context for law enforcement.
• Worked with NCMEC to improve identification and reporting of sadistic online exploitation.

-30-

• Print
• Email
• Like
• Tweet