Illustration by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
A new program called Lantern aims to fight online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) with cross-platform signal sharing between online companies like Meta and Discord. The Tech Coalition, a group of tech businesses with a cooperative aim to fight online child sexual exploitation, wrote in today’s announcement that the program is an attempt to keep predators from avoiding detection by moving potential victims to other platforms.
Lantern serves as a central database for companies to contribute data and check their own platforms against. When companies see signals, like known OCSEA policy-violating email addresses or usernames, child sexual abuse material (CSAM) hashes, or CSAM keywords, they can flag them in their own systems….