2026 Dirty Dozen: Mainstream Contributors to Sexual Exploitation

The National Center on Sexual Exploitation released its 2026 Dirty Dozen List of mainstream contributors to sexual exploitation, naming its first social media founder, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, to its annual list.  The Dirty Dozen List is an annual campaign calling out 12 mainstream entities for facilitating, enabling and even profiting from sexual abuse and exploitation.

This year’s list includes:

• Amazon enables the sale of childlike sex dolls that appear to violate its own policies, endanger children and undermine laws designed to protect minors. Amazon has the resources to prevent this but continues to act only when public pressure mounts.
• Android has the power to protect millions of minors worldwide with a single update. By implementing default safety features such as nudity blurring and web content filtering at the OS level, Android can create a safer digital environment for children and teens.
• The Apple App Store lulls parents with “kid-safe” labels while exposing children to hidden online dangers. Deepfake “nudify” tools, stranger connection apps for 13-year-olds and sex games for preschoolers have gotten past Apple’s supposed safeguards, showing just how easily its review system can be gamed.
• Discord started as a gamer chat app but has become a pipeline for grooming, coercion and sextortion. Predators lure minors from other platforms to Discord, using DMs, video calls and private servers to escalate abuse and share child sexual abuse material. Organized sextortion networks even use Discord to recruit victims and coordinate crimes.
• Google Chromebooks, marketed as tools for education, are failing to protect students from online harm. With default settings leaving many students with unmonitored internet access, invasive data collection and complex safety settings, these devices expose children to predators, explicit content and cyberbullying.
• Grok builds chatbots to normalize rape, sexual violence and prostitution/sex trafficking, and image generators to create sexual imagery. This fuels a culture of entitlement and abuse. Worse yet, Grok’s “age-gate” is little more than a public relations ploy, making all of the above effectively accessible to minors.
• Snapchat is a tool of choice for sextortionists, sex traffickers and child abusers. Internal documents and whistleblower accounts reveal that reports of abuse often have gone ignored, critical safety fixes were dismissed to protect engagement metrics and features such as My AI have promoted statutory rape.
• Steam does nothing to protect children who don’t have the privilege of highly involved, tech-savvy caregivers enrolling them in family accounts. Any child can create a Steam account without parental permission or age verification and immediately have full access to all sexually explicit games.
• Telegram prioritizes privacy for sexual exploiters. It knows that it is a messaging app used by sexual abusers for child sexual abuse material, sex trafficking, sextortion, deepfake image-based sexual abuse and more, yet it continues to operate encryption without real safeguards.
• X has become the front page for sexual abuse online, amplifying exploitation instead of preventing it. Not only did the platform decide to take no action on child sexual abuse material, but it continues to facilitate child abuse, image-based sexual abuse, AI deepfake pornography, prostitution/sex trafficking and more.

The Dirty Dozen continues to grow, even as governments attempt to crack down.

–Alan Goforth