The Tech Coalition, a partnership of the western world’s most popular social media platforms, including Meta, Google, Discord, Amazon and more, has officially launched Lantern, the world’s first cross-platform signal-sharing program designed to empower technology companies to strengthen their child safety policies in a move to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA).

Two of the most pressing dangers faced by young people today are online grooming, where predators make inappropriate sexualised contact with children, and financial sextortion. To perpetrate these abuses, predators often masquerade as peers or friendly connections on public forums, luring their victims into private chats on different platforms to solicit and share child sexual abuse material (CSAM) or coerce payments by threatening to share intimate images.

The key challenge is that such activities span across various social media platforms, and any one company can only see a fraction of the harm facing a victim. Lantern aims to change this by enabling technology companies to securely and responsibly share signals about activity and accounts that violate their child safety policies. These signals can include information related to policy-violating accounts, such as email addresses, usernames, CSAM hashes, or grooming keywords.

While signals are not definitive proof of abuse, they provide essential clues for further investigation, often becoming the missing piece that allows a company to detect real-time threats to a child’s safety.

Until now, no consistent procedure existed for companies to collaborate against predatory actors who evade detection across services. Lantern promises to enhance prevention and detection capabilities, speed up the identification of threats, build situational awareness of new predatory tactics, and strengthen reporting of criminal offenses to the authorities.

Participating companies upload signals to Lantern about activity violating their child safety policies. Other participating companies can then access these signals, review related activities and content against their platform’s policies and terms of service, and take appropriate enforcement actions, such as removing accounts and reporting criminal activity to authorities like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC).

During the pilot phase, MEGA shared URLs with Meta, leading to the investigation and removal of over 10,000 Facebook profiles, pages, and Instagram accounts, which were violating policies. This cooperation highlights the program’s effectiveness in detecting and countering harmful content and activities.

The development of Lantern has been a two-year collaborative effort involving several Tech Coalition members. The program has been designed to be effective against OCSEA, while also ensuring it complies with legal, regulatory, and ethical standards.

To ensure responsible management, Lantern was developed with a focus on safety and privacy, incorporating clear guidelines for data sharing among participating companies, ongoing policy and practice reviews, and mandatory training and check-ins with participants.

The programme has undergone a Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) conducted by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) and engaged with more than 25 experts and organisations focused on child safety, digital rights, advocacy for marginalised communities, government, and law enforcement.

Transparency is a core principle, with Lantern’s inclusion in the Tech Coalition’s annual transparency report, along with recommendations for participating companies to incorporate their involvement into their transparency reporting.

The programme is launching with an initial group of companies in the first phase, including Discord, Google, MEGA, Meta, Quora, Roblox, Snap, and Twitch.

The Tech Coalition remains open to additional participants interested in collaborating to protect children online.