The space that we work in is a challenging one, in that a lot of the content we look at is fundamentally illegal, or the spaces we go looking for it are perhaps illegal for others to research. There's actually quite a narrow group of people in the world who have done a deep dive into these spaces and have a really good understanding of what's happening. I think that if average Canadians—or any Canadians, for that matter—were to wrap their heads around the things that we see and the way that online spaces are weaponized against kids, it would be incredibly shocking, and it would set off alarm bells for just about everyone.
I keep circling back to this notion of lawful but harmful, and this is a really sticky, murky and challenging space for us. When we issue takedown notices for content that is unambiguously illegal, like child sexual abuse, we get pretty good compliance from major service providers. We get really bad compliance, sometimes, from service providers located in eastern Europe or somewhere in eastern Asia.
With the harmful and abusive content that we call “lawful but awful”, there is a lot of push-back, so you can't necessarily go to a police officer and say, “This happened to me,” because the content itself doesn't necessarily rise to the mandate of a police officer or even the justice system, so you need other mechanisms in place.