Eradicating online child sexual exploitation and abuse (CSEA) remains a major priority for technology businesses, policymakers and civil society organizations around the world. 

Our founders set up the Tech collective industry action to prevent and eradicate online child sexual exploitation and abuse. As a positive and inspirational corner of the internet, Pinterest has a zero-tolerance policy and believes these efforts require industry-wide collaboration. We’re proud to join the coalition to work with key players in tech and keep our platform safe and inspiring.”

Tracy Elizabeth, Minor Safety Policy Lead at TikTok, said: “We're at our strongest when we work together, which is why we're proud to join the Tech Coalition. Through this membership, we hope to deepen our evidence-based approach to intervention and contribute our unique learnings from addressing child safety and exploitation. TikTok is also joining the board of the Technology Coalition along with a number of committees that aim to advance protections for children online and off and drive greater transparency of evolving threats to child safety.”

Since the launch of Project Protect—the technology industry’s most ambitious effort to date to tackle CSEA—we’ve made significant progress towards our goal to develop consistent approaches across the technology industry:

  • We’ve partnered with Thorn, the world’s leading developer of technology to defend children from online sexual exploitation, to invest $1M in child protection technology innovation.
  • We’ve developed a fund alongside the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children to encourage research to improve product development and policy understanding to tackle CSEA effectively. The resulting Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund has received over 120 applications, and grants will be awarded in the coming months.
  • We’ve been working with member organizations to tackle the problem of abuse imagery. In March 2021, we convened over 100 experts from policy, industry, civil society and law enforcement from 23 different countries to develop improvements to help prevent the dissemination of abuse imagery on members’ platforms. We’ll shortly publish a paper presenting the results of a second workshop to address the challenges of self-generated indecent imagery featuring youth.
  • We’ve launched rigorous new membership criteria to ensure members are willing to implement technical solutions, respect international policy frameworks set up to fight CSEA, and be held accountable for their efforts.

Next month, the Tech Coalition will be hosting its first annual Multi-Stakeholder Forum to mark the one-year anniversary of Project Protect and highlight the outputs and outcomes of our workshops on CSEA imagery.

If you or your organization would like to join the Tech Coalition or find out more about our work, please contact us here.