This is astonishingly illegal.

What needs to happen is for someone who has a report to make to contact the state attorney general and say "because this company is profiting from child pornography with no reporting mechanism, they have lost their safe harbor protection, and are complicit."

Companies like this need to be taught at the metaphorical end of a rifle.

Yeah, I think that's basically what the FBI agent they interviewed said. There's nothing for him to do and it would be entirely up to prosecutors to do anything. Part of the wrench is that kik can show that they do some sort of things that possibly qualify as "moderation" under the law. Things like auto-banning bots. So in court has apparently successfully kik has made the claim that they do moderate based on things like this so that checks the safe harbor requirement apparently.

But... all the people they claim to have on their "Safety Board" haven't worked for kik for years and all efforts to contact anyone on twitter or anywhere fail. Even DMCA takedowns of revenge porn were being ignored now. It seems to be a dead platform that nevertheless gets app updates uploaded so something is still going on somewhere by someone.

Basically the only option they were discussing was getting the app removed from Google and Apple stores and they compared the situation to Parler where the app was pulled for failing to moderate. And yet kik seems to get a pass somehow. It's a very disturbing and frustrating episode.

This would be easy to prosecute, assuming the allegations are true. They don’t have a working DMCA contact, so they lose safe harbor. They could have the lawyer testify that her client’s underage nudes and related dmca takedowns were never removed, despite court order to take them down. That’s obviously not a special case, so they could spot check a few dozen prior cases, and show non-compliance for those too.

Of course, doing that would cut off a stream of easy pedophile convictions. The prosecutor’s office might like the status quo. It certainly helps increase their metrics.

one mild problem is that kik is from canada

the fbi's real world response would be "let us introduce you to some canadian officers, and we're going to help, but it's actually up to them"

still, as the former owner of an ISP, i've had to do this, and they're actually quite professional and reasonable about it

Makes you wonder if it's deliberately kept up to allow easy transmission of that kind of material... giving CSAM traffickers ample rope to hang themselves, as it were.