Someone making 8300 reports over six months is making 43 reports per day.
You don't stumble upon that many images of child sexual abuse in normal web browsing.
You don't stumble upon that many images of child sexual abuse in normal web browsing.
The law does not discriminate between someone pursuing images for their own usage or to report them. If it did, every criminal would be able to use reporting them as a defense in court and look at them for decades.
Possession / viewing / downloading is illegal because it is very difficult to get probable cause for distribution. Some of them encourage distributors as-well. If viewing was legal and it led to more reports and content being taken down, that would be positive but it could go the other way with it being harder to pursue.