It's a very good question. I'm going to give you two examples of ongoing efforts because as strongly as I believe in age verification it really doesn't address this issue of the harm to somebody over 18, especially the young, developing brains, but to all adults, again going back to the brain impact and brain science.
I'm going to give you a couple of examples about things that are under way.
The one example I'm going to give you is child sexual abuse images. I think we can learn some things from it. It's a company called Thorn that has a deterrence project. They tested a series of messages that go out primarily to men who are searching for child sexual abuse images. When they are searching they get different messages, recognizing there's not one motivation for everybody; there are different sets of motivations. Different messages work to say they need help. Some of them say that if they can find you, law enforcement can find you. They've tested different kinds of messages, and they encourage people to then get help.
I think a different set of messages would go out to people searching, because right now they think, “It's all there. It's great. I'm supposed to be looking. What's wrong with me if I'm not looking? In fact, I'm going to be berated more for not looking and using it, and a number of health professionals and others in my life might tell me I'm supposed to be looking”, so there's no counter-narrative. We need to look at counter-narratives, not only through education but perhaps through messaging that comes up via technology. There are solutions.
There are also very good campaigns just to reach boys and men. One that was launched out of Minnesota I'm very excited about. It's called, “I Don't Buy It”. It's a series of groups that work with men to come together to look at the intersection between sex trafficking, sexual violence, and use of pornography, and how they are really being manipulated by this industry and manipulated by people who say this is how they're supposed to be either for that other group's profit or a really false sense of masculinity that's not healthy for them or healthy for their relationships. They get engaged in that. There are ways they can get active. They learn how to see what's right out there in front of them. They learn how to take action, and they learn to get involved in a meaningful way and speak up and help other boys and men.
I think there are other strategies we need to look at about how we use technology to educate, how we do broader education about the harms and messaging, which is part of the truth campaign I mentioned that was used with tobacco. It was we're going to help them see the lies. We need to look specifically at how we engage our boys and men to recognize how they too are being harmed by this.