Online enticement is now one of the fastest-growing categories NCMEC tracks. In 2025, the CyberTipline received 1.4 million enticement reports, up more than 150% from the year before. Part of that jump comes from the REPORT Act making enticement mandatory to report, and that's the point: platforms are now expected to report behavior, not just files.
That changes the enforcement problem. Much of CSAM detection is built around content you can hash and match. Enticement is a pattern of contact over time, and the decisions around it are harder, including when and how visibly to act on an account.
Detection is starting to catch up. Thorn has added a grooming label to its conversation-level classifier, Roblox has open-sourced Sentinel, the system it uses to surface early grooming patterns in chat, and companies like Aiba are building behavioral detection for various online communites. Thats great progress, but for platforms - means will facing harder account decision more often, not less.
Timing matters because of how offenders operate. Thorn's 2022 grooming research found that nearly two in three minors had been invited by an online-only contact to move a conversation to a private chat on a different platform, and groomers routinely use that move to isolate victims. A visible ban on one platform doesn't end that relationship, and it can speed up the move to a place where no one is watching.
None of this argues for leaving harmful material up. Content comes down, gets preserved, and gets reported, and a child in immediate danger comes first. NCMEC escalated more than 53,000 urgent or imminent-danger reports to law enforcement last year.
The judgment call is on the account: act immediately and visibly, or restrict quietly while investigations maps linked accounts and law enforcement decides what it needs. Immature programs default to the ban because it's the only lever their tooling gives them, and it looks like success on a dashboard. In practice, the offender returns on a fresh account with none of the history that flagged them, linked accounts go unexamined, and the child is still reachable wherever the conversation already moved.
The industry is building the other half. Through the Tech Coalition's Lantern program, participating companies had shared more than 2 million signals by the end of 2025, supporting over 350,000 enforcement actions across platforms. If offenders work across services, a single platform's ban is one move in a longer sequence, and the response has to be coordinated to match.
A banned account is not a closed case. In enticement work, speed isn't the standard. A safe child and a fully mapped network are.
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