The Metropolitan Police says it is "liaising" with the Daily Mail after a journalist wrote about visiting child pornography sites.
Specialist officers are in discussion with the paper after the article headed 'My journey into the hell that is internet child porn', was published.
In it, Amanda Platell described how she used the same search terms as Stuart Hazell, who was jailed for life for the murder of schoolgirl Tia Sharp.
"During the past two harrowing days, I have discovered how easy it is to enter Hazell’s world," she wrote, setting out the search terms she used to bring up obscene footage of young children.
Amanda Platell said she wanted to show how easy it was to access the material
"Not through desire, nor curiosity, but to expose first-hand the horrendous world of child pornography that is now so freely available online, and to warn parents how close their own children come to it every time they log on to the internet."
The article provoked a Twitter backlash:
Child protection expert and former policeman Mark Williams-Thomas, who helped expose Jimmy Savile, said he had reported Platell to the police.
A Metropolitan Police spokesman said: "Officers from the Specialist Crime and Operational Command unit are in liaison with the Daily Mail."
The unit is the section of the Met that investigates child pornography.
Platell, a former press secretary for William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, described in the article what she typed into Google in order to be "deluged" with obscene video clips.
She wrote: "I apologise to Mail readers, who may feel this is not appropriate journalism for a family newspaper and that we should not give such obscene material the oxygen of publicity.
"But someone has to speak up."