Social media must act after paedophile sexually abused thousands of girls as young as ten online

In 2019, Police Scotland began an investigation with the help of an exceptionally brave 13-year-old girl that would uncover a global "paedophile enterprise" run by a Northern Ireland man from the bedroom of his childhood home.

Yesterday, as a result of what became a worldwide police operation, Alexander McCartney, 26, a former computer science student, was given a life sentence after he was found to have groomed and blackmailed an estimated 3,500 girls as young as ten, from at least 28 countries, into performing sex acts.

One of his victims, 12-year-old Cimarron Thomas, from West Virginia, took her own life in May 2018 rather than comply with his demands to make her younger sister carry out sex acts on a webcam. Cimarron’s heartbroken father, Ben Thomas, killed himself 18 months later.

Targeting girls with poor body image or doubts about their sexuality, McCartney posed as a girl of similar age on Snapchat and other social media platforms in order to persuade them to send him topless photographs, which he would then use to blackmail them. In one case, this took him just nine minutes.

Sentencing him, Mr Justice O'Hara said McCartney had used social media on “an industrial scale to inflict such terrible and catastrophic damage on young girls”, ignoring “multiple pleas for mercy”. When Cimarron told him she would take her own life, he responded by giving her a countdown to the moment he would send images of her to her father. He admitted Cimarron’s manslaughter in court.

Cimarron Thomas, 12, from West Virginia, US, took her own life while being blackmailed by paedophile Alexander McCartney | Picture via Police Service of Northern Ireland/PA

Few systems are foolproof. However the scale of McCartney’s offending suggests social media platforms need to be doing a lot more to protect children from such depraved sexual predators. Furthermore, there is a host of other online horrors, such as websites promoting self-harm and suicide, that are still far too easily accessed by children.

Until the global companies involved take adequate steps, or are forced to do so by governments, parents who may be less familiar with the online world than the young generation have little choice but to educate themselves about the dangers, speak to their children, and do their best to keep them safe.