Ashton Kutcher is making headlines today over his emotional testimony of his work fighting online child trafficking.
Although he’s best known for his acting, Kutcher is chairman of tech non-profit Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, which creates online tools to help police identify and locate child trafficking victims.
Speaking at the US Senate hearing Ending Modern Slavery: Building on Success in Washington, Kutcher called for more government support to develop anti-online trafficking technology.
“Technology can be used to enable slavery, but it can also be used to disable slavery,” Kutcher said.
In an address wracked with emotion, Kutcher described “FBI raids where I’ve seen things that no person should ever see.”
“I’ve seen video content of a child that is the same age as mine being raped by an American man that was a sex tourist in Cambodia.”
“I’ve been on the other end of a phone call from my team asking for my help because we had received a call from the Department of Homeland Security telling us that a seven-year-old girl was being sexually abused and that content was being spread around the dark web and she’d been being abused and they’d watched her for three years and they could not find the perpetrator.”
Kutcher began his address by acknowledging the “internet trolls” who would hear his speech and tell him to stick to his day job. “So I’d like to talk about my day job,” he said, before going on to detail his work with Thorn.
He then mentions his other job, that of caring for his two-month-old and two-year-old children with wife Mila Kunis.