Stopline report centre: annual report presented

More than twice as many illegal cases were registered at the report centre against sexual abuse images of minors and National Socialism in 2023 than in the previous year. Austrian servers were not affected.

Stopline’s annual report for 2023 was presented at a press conference. According to the report, a total of 33,349 reports of sexual abuse images of minors and National Socialism on the internet were submitted to Stopline in 2023. This roughly corresponds to the previous year's level.

However, the number of reports that were classified as illegal increased significantly: almost 11,000, or around 33%, were classified as such. This corresponds to a doubling compared to the previous year. 99% of these cases concerned depictions of abuse of minors.

No indications of illegal content on Austrian servers were reported in 2023. Austria has been one of the world's least attractive hosting locations for illegal content for years. This is seen as a success of the “deleting instead of blocking” strategy and the cooperation between the report centre, providers and authorities. Most of the reports concerned servers in the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the Ukraine.

Stopline was founded in 1998 by the ISPA and is a report centre recognized by the authorities against sexual abuse images of minors and National Socialism on the Internet. Stopline is part of INHOPE, a worldwide network of hotlines that was founded in 1999 as part of the European Commission's Safer Internet Action Plan. Stopline is financially supported by funds from the EU Safer Internet Program and the Austrian domain registry nic.at, a subsidiary of the Internet Stiftung.

June 2024

More information