Read any marketing material by the NCMEC, and you'd be forgiven for thinking they spend all day wading through horrific images of children being violently abused. The 'charity' and its cousins, like Canada's Cybertip and the UK's Internet Watch Foundation, have a financial motivation to make you believe this. Their governments, likewise, benefit from a 'threat' that allows them to pass increasingly draconian laws but can never be verified under threat of imprisonment. It's a convenient state of affairs for the powers that be.

The kind editors of Yesmap Wiki have long been working to dispel many of the claims of such charities. So have I, both here and on Mu. Evidence indicates that the vast majority of images are now generated by AI or produced by minors themselves, rather than an adult recording themself engaging in criminalized conduct with a child. And according to an anonymous source who recently shared a guest blog on this very site, even criminalized images depicting AMSC are typically nothing like how the charities describe them.

You may think the NCMEC and their friends would dislike our dissenting commentary... and it seems you might be right.

The reason Yesmap and Mu went down last week

Take a look at the image on the right of your screen. Since December 2025 and the time that Yesmap and Mu (same server) went down, the NCMEC had sent 220 'CSAM' complaints focusing mostly on this and one other meme, both hosted on Yesmap Wiki. The public are told that CSAM depicts violent crime scenes, the destruction of a child's innocence, the repeated brutalization of a child, and so on. I ask you... does this image do that? Are we seeing a child having their life destroyed, or being exploited in some way? Of course not. And there's no court in the world that would label this CSAM.

Questions

This bizarre behavior by the NCMEC raises a number of questions.

Was it a targeted attack?

Yesmap Wiki is by far the best source of digestible pro-MAP content on the internet, and provides a plethora of evidence that counters the NCMEC's lies. The site does not host any illegal content, which must be quite a frustration to an organization that would really like to see it taken down. Did the NCMEC knowingly send bogus reports about random images, believing many hosts will just delete rather than check?

Or are they using automation?

Another possibility is that the NCMEC are using automation. This might involve crawling the web for images that match hashes in a database of supposedly criminalized material. Copyright trolls are notorious for doing this with copyrighted images.

As I warned earlier in the year, such databases will inevitably include false positives. It's almost a guarantee that overworked police or NGO interns will sometimes batch upload the content of a suspect's device to their database, along with their memes, photos of their trip to Paris, and pictures of their pet dog. It's worth noting that the NCMEC does use interns en masse presumably to offset the tidy packages offered to more senior staff. Rampant errors would hardly be a surprise.

The daily complaints also hint at automation. Would a reasonable human look at those memes, think they constitute extreme 'CSAM', and report every single day as if it was some kind of emergency? And how many other innocent people are being harassed like this, potentially accused of child sex offenses in the process?

Or did some intern really think it was 'CSAM'?

There is of course the possibility that a poorly trained intern might have concluded, in his or her infinite wisdom, that a meme joking about an adult being interested in a minor constitutes 'CSAM'. The social media generation do have an extreme perspective on anything MAP-related. And it would be remiss not to point out that the 'war on CSAM' is often about profiteering and punishing deviance, not about saving actual children from harm. They could well think no further than "eww pedos, better label it CSAM!"

It's time to stop trusting the NCMEC

When we contacted our host, they explained that the complaints were not just from some random person, but from the NCMEC. With a heavy backlog of complaints (about various sites) and not wanting to trawl through potential criminalized images of minors, they suspended the Yesmap/Mu server along with all of the other accounts targeted by NCMEC reports. This indicates that the NCMEC is treated as an entirely reliable source by ISPs, one that never lies or makes mistakes.

Yet this situation is a perfect illustration of why the NCMEC cannot be trusted blindly. Their staff are not trained police investigators, but college students doing internships to get a bit of work experience. Their systems likely rely on a degree of automation, leading to the nonsense of 200+ reports over the same two memes. Furthermore, with the corruption inherent in 'anti-CSAM' charities and such, I wouldn't put it past them to attempt to silence those whose commentary deviates from the mantra that sustains their existence.

And a lesson for everyone? When charities like the NCMEC talk about the thousands of violent and abusive images they've taken down, remember that they're full of shit. Their figures are no doubt stuffed with banal memes and cartoons like these. The higher the numbers in their annual reports, the more the dollars trickle in...

This article will be forwarded to the NCMEC's media team with a request for comment.