Thorn, a nonprofit that builds technology to combat child sexual exploitation, launched a tool on Wednesday to help small- and medium-size companies find, remove and report child sexual abuse material. The tool, called Safer, is designed for companies that lack the resources to build their own systems. “To eliminate the trade of this material and stop the revictimization of children in these images and videos you need to have blanket coverage of tech companies,” said Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn, which was co-founded by the actor and investor Ashton Kutcher.
At its launch on Wednesday, Safer is in use by 10 customers including the image-sharing sites Flickr, Imgur and VSCO; the workplace communication tool Slack; the blogging platform Medium; the video-sharing site Vimeo; and the web-hosting company GoDaddy. According to Thorn, Safer has already detected 100,000 child sexual abuse images on these platforms. The launch of Safer comes as record amounts of child sexual abuse material circulates online. In 2019, more than 69 million images and videos were reported to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
“People are really afraid to talk about it, but this is a problem that all tech companies are facing,” said Sarah Schaaf, co-founder of Imgur. “We all know this is an issue worth combatting but, when you are a smaller or mid-sized company, it’s tough. It requires a large financial investment and experts who know what to do.” Safer provides access to the expertise and infrastructure to deal with these illegal images without having to build and maintain the technology in house, Schaaf said.
Source: NBC News
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