Last week, the Tech Coalition hosted Initiate 2024, our third annual hackathon, bringing together technical specialists, engineers, and child safety leaders from across the tech industry to combat online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA). Yahoo, a founding member of the Tech Coalition, hosted Initiate in 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 focused on Lantern, the Tech Coalition’s cross-platform signal-sharing program, which aims to enhance the industry’s ability to identify and mitigate OCSEA across multiple platforms. Lantern represents a massive legal, operational, and engineering achievement—requiring extensive coordination to implement effectively.
Lantern's Progress
During Initiate 2024, significant strides were made toward expanding Lantern’s adoption, with Meta unveiling significant advancements to ThreatExchange, the underlying tech of Lantern. The day was packed with integration workshops, peer mentorship sessions, and collaborative discussions on ways to effectively use Lantern signals in investigations. Two companies successfully onboarded and began engaging with Lantern, furthering our mission to tackle cross-platform abuse through signal sharing.
As we continue developing Lantern, we are focused on enabling companies to better detect and disrupt OCSEA activities across 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 spotlighted the transformative potential—and risks—of Generative AI. With the rapid growth of AI technologies, especially generative models, it is crucial to ensure these advancements are leveraged responsibly, particularly regarding child safety.
We partnered with Childnet International to host a youth panel featuring representatives aged 13-17 from their Youth Advisory Board. Youth perspectives are critical in this space, as they are not only major consumers of digital products and services but also are most affected by new technological developments.
The workshop allowed industry representatives to hear directly from young people about their experiences with generative AI—their views on its potential, concerns about its misuse, and ideas for protection against AI-related harms. These insights will shape future policies and AI model development, ensuring that the next generation of digital tools can better serve and protect young users.
In addition to hearing from young people, Tech Coalition members explored ways to collaborate on addressing generative AI-related harms. Industry participants demonstrated their commitment to work 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 throughout Initiate 2024 was the power of collaboration. Real-time problem solving, knowledge sharing, and hands-on coding sessions enabled significant progress in the fight against OCSEA. This spirit of collaboration resulted in tangible outcomes across several key initiatives:
- Meta’s ThreatExchange platform saw significant advancements, further enhancing its capabilities in threat detection and information sharing.
- The Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) open-source project made major strides, with Patreon adopting HMA as part of the hackathon. Additionally, the Tech Coalition successfully integrated PhotoDNA into HMA, enabling any company with a PhotoDNA license to quickly implement PhotoDNA hashing and matching through open-source infrastructure, and added additional debugging features to help engineers troubleshoot during implementation. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for platforms to scale their CSAM detection efforts.
- Engineers developed reference APIs for NCMEC exchanges, including the Take It Down API, to help companies submit and access hash quality feedback from one another. Now, once a company manually reviews a hash match and confirms that it corresponds to CSAM, they can upload this confirmation into the exchange so it is visible by other companies along with the hash, thereby increasing overall confidence and precision of the matches in the exchange that have gone through multiple stages of independent manual review.
- Participants prototyped a hash compatibility translation tool that would provide industry with the ability to convert hashes in old formats into new formats. During the hackathon, engineers were able to reduce error in translation to a degree where images were being accurately translated between two hash formats. Over time, if successful, this project would enable rapid innovation and significantly reduce the costs of industry interoperability.
Advancement in Technical Capacity
Increasing our member’s technical capacity to combat OCSEA remains at the heart of the Tech Coalition’s mission. One of the most exciting developments came from Google, which unveiled its latest Content Safety API model. The new API feature strengthens privacy frameworks and improves the speed of media processing to enhance the ability to detect and prioritize CSAM.
Several companies, including Adobe, Yahoo, and Sony Interactive Entertainment, participated in real-time integration and feedback sessions during the event. These advancements mark a critical step forward in enhancing the technical capacity of industry players to combat OCSEA more effectively.
A Proven Track Record of Impact
Initiate 2024 builds on the foundation laid in previous years to facilitate industry collaboration to tackle OCSEA. Each year, our hackathons have resulted in real-world impacts, from the development of new tools to the adoption of existing technologies:
- Google’s participation at Initiate’s first hackathon informed the development of the video version of its Content Safety API classifier.
- Sony Interactive Entertainment adopted the Content Safety API for image analysis moderation in 2023, strengthening its commitment to ensuring a safe playing environment.
- Discord developed and implemented the CLIP hashing model to detect unknown and AI-generated CSAM, and made the technology open source and without cost for other organizations to utilize to combat CSAM.
- As a result of work at Initiate 2023, a Tech Coalition member company was able to adopt HMA this year, ensuring hashing and matching against illegal and harmful content.
- We drafted the v1 taxonomy for Lantern, an important milestone in building a unified approach to signal sharing.
Looking Ahead
The success of Initiate 2024 underscores the value of in-person collaboration and the power of collective action in combating online child sexual exploitation and abuse. We are excited to continue this momentum, working with our members and partners to drive innovation, share resources, and make the internet a safer place for children.
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 event’s success. The progress made during Initiate 2024 will reverberate through the industry, pushing us closer to our shared goal of an online world 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.