Overview
- Prosecutors in Barcelona say their computer-crimes unit opened 132 procedures in 2025 and that about 50–60% of new inquiries began with reports from platforms such as Google, Meta and Microsoft.
- Major companies reported and removed millions of suspected child sexual abuse items in early 2026, with Google/YouTube logging about 8.2 million and Meta over 33 million in the first half of the year.
- Most platform detections are automated, which raises referral volume but does not equal confirmed crimes or identified victims and often produces lower-complexity cases for prosecutors to review.
- Forensic laboratories and prosecutorial workflows are overloaded, producing multi-year delays and a much lower ratio of written charges to opened procedures in Barcelona last year.
- The flow of alerts is highly international: U.S.-based NCMEC forwarded tens of thousands of communications linked to Spain and platform cooperation sometimes speeds information sharing but access to account or cloud data still sometimes requires formal judicial requests.