Meta joins ‘Lantern’ programme to fight against online child abuse

Meta has announced its participation in the ‘Lantern’ programme, which enables technology companies to share signals about accounts and behaviours that violate their child safety policies.

Meta was a founding member of Lantern. The company partnered with the Tech Coalition, a group of tech companies with a collective aim to fight online child sexual exploitation, on this programme.

Meta provided the Tech Coalition with the technical infrastructure that sits behind the programme and continues to maintain it.

“At Meta, we want young people to have safe, positive experiences online and we’ve spent a decade developing tools and policies designed to protect them,” Meta said in a blogpost on Tuesday.

Lantern enables technology companies to share a variety of signals about accounts and behaviours that violate their child safety policies. Lantern participants can use this information to conduct investigations on their own platforms and take action.

Moreover, Meta mentioned that during Lantern’s pilot phase, it used information provided by one of the programme’s partners, Mega, to remove more than 10,000 violating Facebook Profiles, Pages and Instagram accounts that violated the platform’s policies. These accounts were then reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Apart from Meta, other big tech companies like Discord, Google, Mega, Quora, Roblox, Snap, and Twitch are also participating in the Lantern programme.

“Lantern is launching with an initial group of companies joining this first phase, including Discord, Google, Mega, Meta, Quora, Roblox, Snap, and Twitch,” the Tech Coalition wrote in its announcement.

The coalition said their experiences will help evaluate and strengthen this necessary new initiative to collaborate against a profoundly consequential threat.

“This ongoing work and the industry-wide collaboration are incredibly important steps in helping to keep children safe online and the partnership speaks to Google’s longstanding commitment to preventing CSAE on our platforms,” said Laurie Richardson, VP of Trust and Safety at Google.