Backed by Nominet, Intercept is our £1 million-pound initiative, the first of its kind anywhere, working to revolutionise warning messages online. Our ultimate aim is to stop the spread of child sexual abuse material on the internet.  

The problem 

In the late 1990s child sexual abuse material had almost been eradicated. But with the rise of the internet there have been year-on-year increases in the number of images and videos of child sexual abuse found online. In 2023, the Internet Watch Foundation found 275,652 web pages containing child sexual abuse imagery.  

People searching, sharing and creating child sexual abuse material on the internet currently do so largely unchallenged. Websites and online platforms don’t have a consistent approach to warning messages for people who are on a path to offending. A few do it well, some do it badly, and most don’t do it at all. Over three years, we want to change this.  

The solution 

Working with a wide range of tech, from search engines to social media, from gaming to file sharing, we want to make warning messages the norm, not the exception. Encouraging tech companies to adopt and deploy these messages is part of our goal, but further than that, we want them to experiment with us, to find the best possible versions of messages for their type of space.  

With this experimentation we hope to add to the evidence base around the effectiveness of messaging to change the behaviour of people looking to harm children online. The more we build the evidence, the more persuasive we can be when talking to tech companies. A big part of the evidence we have so far revolves around the chatbot, which is now incorporated into Project Intercept. The chatbot showed that in 82% of sessions on Pornhub UK where people had searched for sexual videos of children, only one warning was needed to make the illegal searching stop. 

The case for warnings 

Ofcom, the UK online safety regulator, have recommended warnings in their illegal harms consultation, as a way of adding ‘friction’ to internet users who are searching for sexual images of children. They also recommend signposting to helplines such as ours.  

We already know from our work with people who have offended, and some who were on a path to offending, that there are four key themes we need to include in our deterrent work. They are: 

It’s a crime 

It causes harm 

There are consequences... 

But there is help available  

Offering help is key. Not only are we deterring people from starting out down a path to offending, we are signposting them to help in the form of Stop It Now. Not everyone will be ready at the first or second warning – but imagine if warnings were commonplace and confronted people wherever they searched for this material. Everyone who needed to know, would know that help exists. 

Example warnings 

We work with some of the most prominent names in the online world, but we’re always keen to work with more, whatever their size. Our interventions with Google and Meta have been in place for years. Our work with Pornhub is more recent, but just as impactful. We work with the IWF to ensure their members serve a warning splash page with links to our helpline whenever someone tries to access a website or link that has been blocked for containing sexual images of children. 

Project Intercept is due to run until September 2026.