Online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) is a global epidemic, and technology companies have a responsibility to do everything they can to combat it. That's why the Tech Coalition, a group of leading technology companies, has launched Lantern, a new initiative to help technology companies share signals about CSEA activity and accounts across platforms.
This is the first program of its kind, and it has the potential to make a real difference in the lives of children around the world. By allowing companies to share information about child sexual abuse material and online sexual harrassment activity, Lantern can help to:
- Increase prevention and detection capabilities
- Speed up the identification of threats
- Build situational awareness of new predatory tactics
- Strengthen reporting to authorities of criminal offenses
How Lantern works to fight Online Sexual Exploitation of Children
Lantern is a secure and responsible platform for sharing signals about CSEA activity. With this CSEA technology, participating companies upload signals to Lantern, which then uses a variety of techniques to identify and prioritize them. Once Lantern prioritizes a signal, it shares it with the relevant companies.
Companies can use the information to prevent child sexual exploitation. They can do this by deleting accounts, reporting predators, or developing new prevention and detection methods.
Benefits of Lantern
Lantern offers a number of benefits to both technology companies and the public.
- For technology companies, Lantern can help to reduce the workload of combatting CSEA. By sharing information about CSEA activity, companies can avoid having to develop and maintain their own systems. Lantern can also help companies to improve the accuracy of CSEA detection and make it more difficult for predators to evade detection.
- For the public, Lantern can help to make the internet a safer place for children. By helping companies to identify and remove CSEA activity, Lantern can reduce the risk of children being exposed to harmful content or online sexual exploitation. Lantern can also help to deter predators' online activities.
How to get involved
If you are a technology company, you can learn more about Lantern and how to participate on the Tech Coalition website and you can join the growing list of participating companies that includes Google, Meta, Discord, Mega, Snap, Twitch and others.
If you are a member of the public, you can support Lantern by encouraging the technology companies you use to participate in the program. You can also contact your elected officials and urge them to support policies that promote online child safety.
Lantern's proactive approach to helping combat the proliferation of child sexual abuse material and online predator activity online is a necessary approach toward protecing children. Law enforcement can then use ADF digital forensic software solutions to investigate crimes against children when Cybertips are reported by technology platforms to NCMEC.
