Measuring what matters: tracking progress in online child safety

Held on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly (UNGA), the event made one thing clear: without better data, it’s hard to know the true scale of the issue, what’s changing, and which online safety features are working best.

Current gaps in measurement make it difficult to establish baselines, track progress, and demonstrate the impact of industry and cross-sector efforts to combat online harms.

Speakers shared trends in OCSEA prevalence—including new harm types and shifting perpetrator profiles—as well as industry advancements in prevention and detection. But they also agreed that existing data doesn’t give a full picture of OCSEA. To build safer platforms and products, we need stronger, shared ways to measure prevalence and a clearer baseline to work from.

The event drew more than 100 child safety experts across government, law enforcement, civil society, academia, and tech. Participants heard from UNICEF, the Moore Center at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Meta, Snap, and Microsoft. A special thanks to Meta for hosting the event, to Cloudflare, Depop, Google, MediaLab, TikTok, and Yahoo for contributing to our planning group, and to Meta and Snap for co-chairing it.

Here are the concrete steps the Tech Coalition will be driving forward from this event:

Supporting member companies to track OCSEA prevalence

We’ll host a webinar for members to unpack OCSEA prevalence: what it means, how it can be measured, and how better data can guide product and safety decisions.

We’ll also add measurement of OCSEA on platforms into our member mileposts for annual reporting. This will help members benchmark progress in measurement practices, and strengthen the understanding of industry’s progress over time. 

Adding clarity to industry transparency reporting 

We’ll publish a resource looking at how industry transparency reports can—and can’t—be used to understand OCSEA prevalence. 

We’ll also review the Trust voluntary framework for industry transparency implementation guide and revise as needed to reflect good practices in measurement. 

And, as always, we’ll continue publishing annual reports on member progress and the Lantern program to provide meaningful and transparent insights into industry action and impact.

Keeping the conversation going 

Finally, we’ll bring together a smaller, follow-on expert roundtable to build on the UNGA event. This group will dig deeper into how we can strengthen measurement principles across sectors and examine the shared tools industry and partners need to track progress on child safety.