Technology Coalition | Start 2024: Promote industry collaboration to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse

Last week the Tech Coalition hosted Starts 2024our third annual hackathon, bringing together technical specialists, engineers and child safety leaders from across the technology industry to combat Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse (OCSEA). Yahoo, a founding member of the Tech Coalition, hosted Initiate at its London office, building on its longstanding commitment to facilitating industry-wide online child safety initiatives. The two-day event focused on cross-platform collaboration, technical innovation and the integration of emerging technologies. It was a powerful demonstration of how the tech industry can unite to protect children online.

The first day of Initiate 2024 was all about Lanternthe Tech Coalition’s cross-platform signal exchange program, which aims to increase the industry’s ability to identify and mitigate OCSEA across multiple platforms. Lantern represents a monumental legal, operational and technical achievement that will require extensive coordination to implement effectively.

Lantern’s progress

At Initiate 2024, significant steps were taken toward expanding Lantern adoption, with Meta unveiling significant improvements to ThreatExchange, Lantern’s underlying technology. The day was packed with integration workshops, peer mentorship sessions and collaborative discussions on ways to effectively use Lantern Signals in research. Two companies have successfully onboarded and partnered with Lantern, furthering our mission to tackle cross-platform abuse through signal sharing.

As we continue to develop Lantern, we want to enable companies to better detect and disrupt OCSEA activity on their platforms. The integration of Lantern is not just a technological achievement; it shows how the tech industry is coming together to prioritize child safety.

Collaboration and youth voices on generative AI

The second day of Initiate 2024 highlighted the transformative potential – and risks – of Generative AI. With the rapid growth of AI technologies, especially generative models, it is crucial to ensure that these developments are used responsibly, especially when it comes to child safety.

We worked together with Childnet International organize a youth panel with representatives aged 13 to 17 from their youth advisory board. The perspective of young people is crucial in this area, as they are not only major consumers of digital products and services, but also the most affected by new technological developments.

During the workshop, industry representatives heard directly from young people about their experiences with generative AI: their views on its potential, concerns about its misuse and ideas for protecting against AI-related harm. These insights will shape future policy and AI model development, ensuring that the next generation of digital tools can better serve and protect young users.

In addition to listening to youth, members of the Tech Coalition explored ways to work together to address generative AI-related harm. Industry participants showed their commitment to working together on these pressing issues, ensuring that generative AI is used for good while protecting vulnerable populations from its potential dangers.

Innovation and progress

A recurring theme during Initiate 2024 was the power of collaboration. Real-time problem solving, knowledge sharing, and hands-on coding sessions have enabled significant progress in the fight against OCSEA. This spirit of collaboration resulted in tangible results for several key initiatives:

• Meta’s ThreatExchange platform saw significant advancements, further expanding its threat detection and information sharing capabilities.
• The Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) open source project made great strides, with Patreon Adopt HMA as part of the hackathon. Furthermore, the Tech Coalition has been successfully integrated PhotoDNA in HMA, allowing any company with a PhotoDNA license to quickly deploy PhotoDNA hashing and matching via an open-source infrastructure, and additional debugging features have been added to help engineers troubleshoot issues during implementation. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for platforms to scale their CSAM detection efforts.
• Engineers developed reference APIs for NCMEC exchangesincluding the Take It Down API, to help companies submit and obtain hash quality feedback from each other. Once a company has manually reviewed a hash match and confirms that it matches CSAM, they can upload this confirmation to the exchange so that it is visible to other companies along with the hash, increasing overall confidence and accuracy of the matches in the exchange is increased. that have gone through multiple stages of independent manual review.
• Participants created a prototype of one hash compatibility translation tool that would give the industry the ability to convert hashes in old formats into new formats. During the hackathon, engineers were able to reduce translation errors so that images were accurately translated between two hash formats. If successful, this project would ultimately enable rapid innovation and significantly reduce the costs of industrial interoperability.

Advances in technical capacity

Increasing the technical capacity of our members to combat OCSEA remains core to the Tech Coalition’s mission. One of the most exciting developments emerged Googlingwho unveiled his latest Content Safety API model. The new API feature strengthens privacy frameworks and improves media processing speed to increase the ability to detect and prioritize CSAM.

Various companies, including Adobe, Yahoo and Sony Interactive Entertainmentparticipated in real-time integration and feedback sessions during the event. These advancements mark a critical step forward in increasing the technical capacity of industry players to more effectively combat OCSEA.

A proven track record of impact

Initiate 2024 builds on the foundation laid in previous years to facilitate industry collaboration to address OCSEA. Every year, our hackathons have resulted in real-world impact, from the development of new tools to the adoption of existing technologies:

• GooglingInitiate’s participation in the first Initiate hackathon formed the basis for the development of its video version Content Safety API Rating.
• Sony interactive entertainment adopted the Content Safety API for moderating image analysis in 2023, reinforcing its commitment to ensuring a safe gaming environment.
• Disagreement developed and implemented CLIP hashing model to detect unknown and AI-generated CSAM, and make the technology open source and free of charge so that other organizations can use it to combat CSAM.
• As a result of the work at Initiate 2023, a Tech Coalition member company was able to adopt it HMA This year we will provide hashing and matching against illegal and harmful content.
• We have the v1 taxonomy for Lanternan important milestone in building a unified approach to signal sharing.

Looking ahead

The success of Initiate 2024 underlines the value of personal collaboration and the power of collective action in combating online child sexual exploitation and abuse. We’re excited to continue this momentum and work with our members and partners to drive innovation, share resources, and make the internet a safer place for kids.

Together, we are not only advancing technology, but also fostering a global community committed to protecting children online. Thank you to everyone who contributed to the success of the event. The progress made at Initiate 2024 will ripple across the industry and bring us closer to our shared goal: an online world that is safer for children.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to drive meaningful change in the fight against online child sexual exploitation and abuse.