For more than 25 years, the activities of the eco Complaints Office, have actively contributed to the fight against illegal Internet content. Every day we receive reports of depictions of sexual abuse, anti-constitutional or other content relevant to criminal law or the protection of minors.


Everything revolves around the question of how we can make the Internet of tomorrow a little better together with all the actors involved. After all, the protection of minors from harmful media in all its facets is and remains a task for society as a whole and consists of many elements. Transparency creates trust in the work of complaints offices, also known as hotlines. Therefore, eco published the annual report of the eco Complaints Office for the year 2022, which is available in German, and English.

With 8,904 actionable cases, we reached a new high in the reporting year – corresponding to an increase of about 3.4 per cent. Once again, depictions of sexualised violence against children made up the majority of these complaints.
In close cooperation with our network partners, we were able to achieve in 2022, that Websites hosted in Germany with content still referred to as child pornography in legal parlance were deleted 100 per cent of the time and within an average of around 2.8 days.

Worldwide, such content was removed in about a week, with an overall success rate of 98.5%. This underlines how important the work of the hotlines is and that the principle of notice and take-down instead of blocking continues to work very well.


Visit eco.de for more information on their activities and publications.