Lantern Expands into Financial Sector to Combat Online Child Sexual Exploitation

Expanding Lantern Program into the Financial Sector

As of August 22, 2024, Lanterna pioneering child safety platform that facilitates cross-platform signal sharinghas expanded its reach to encompass financial institutions. The realm of financially incentivized online child sexual exploitation and abuse OCSEA involves a variety of harmful practices, including extortion involving the distribution of sexually explicit material from minors, trafficking in child sexual abuse material CSAM, sex tourism, live-streamed abuse, and more. Criminals often exploit multiple platforms for these exploitative activities agnst children, sometimes utilizing online payment systems as a facilitator.

To combat this growing threat, The Tech Coalition is initiating a pilot program with select financial institutions to assess the efficacy of signal sharing in disrupting the financial incentives associated with OCSEA. This initiative builds on a previous proof-of-concept pilot conducted by technology companies prior to Lantern's official launch scheduled for November 2023.

Western Union and Block Inc., known for its subsidiary, Square, are among the initial organizations joining this pioneering effort within the financial sector. Participation in Lantern is open to any tech company or financial institution that fulfills specific eligibility criteria including a rigorous application process and compliance review prior to entering into formal agreements with other Lantern participants. Enhanced safeguards have been established by The Tech Coalition to mitigate risks associated with information sharing.

Broadening Lantern's network has been a top priority for The Tech Coalition this year, leading to the addition of twenty new companies since its inception: Block Inc., Discord, Dropbox, Google, MediaLab, MEGA, Meta, Microsoft, Niantic, Photobucket, Quora, Reddit, Roblox, Scribd, Snap Inc., Twitch, Western Union, X an Alphabet company, Yahoo, Yubo, and Zoom.

Sextortion-specific signals are increasingly being shared through Lantern. Contributors include Snap and Meta among others, with Meta making a recent announcement that they have leveraged information from Lantern in cooperation with another tech company to remove 63,000 Instagram accounts linked to Nigeria-based activities within their platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.

Signals exchanged via Lantern have led to tangible outcomes in the protection of children agnst cross-platform abuse. As a result of these shared signals through December 2023 including during pilot phase, participating companies identified and took enforcement actions agnst over 30,989 accounts for violating policies on child sexual exploitation and abuse. Furthermore, more than 1,293 individual instances of CSAM were removed, along with the deletion of 389 URLs or bulk uploads contning CSAM material from platforms.

These outcomes complement the measures already taken by individual companies agnst policy violations on their own platforms according to established terms of service.

Join us in our commitment to safeguarding children from online sexual exploitation and abuse through Lantern's innovative approach.

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