Key facts
- TikTok's U.S. unit, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, has joined Lantern, a child safety program.
- Lantern helps social media companies share signals of harmful behavior and content.
- The program's members include Google, X, Snap, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple.
- TikTok committed $2 million to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to modernize its CyberTipline.
- The NCMEC project aims to deploy advanced tools for detecting harm and accelerating reports to law enforcement.
TikTok's U.S. unit, known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture, has joined Lantern, a cross-platform child safety initiative founded by a consortium of technology companies. Launched in 2023, Lantern facilitates the secure sharing of information regarding harmful behavior and content among its members to help identify and disrupt bad actors operating across different platforms. Prominent members include Google, X, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple.
Marc Leone, director of Lantern, emphasized the importance of such collaborations in combating child sexual exploitation and abuse, noting that TikTok's participation will enhance coordinated enforcement within the tech ecosystem. The move aligns TikTok with most of its competitors who are already part of the program, which has facilitated the sharing of over 2 million signals of potentially violating behavior through 2025.
In addition to joining Lantern, TikTok's U.S. venture is committing $2 million to NCMEC's efforts to modernize its CyberTipline. This investment is intended to support the deployment of advanced tools for detecting harm, reducing manual processing times, and expediting actionable reports to law enforcement. The NCMEC project is projected to take three years and cost $10 million, with contributions also expected from AWS, Microsoft, and Palantir.