In a significant stride towards enhancing online safety, Thorn, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting children from sexual abuse through technology, has forged a partnership with Hive, a leader in AI-driven content moderation. This collaboration is set to integrate Thorn’s child safety tool, Safer, into Hive’s extensive content moderation technologies, impacting hundreds of online platforms.

Headquartered in Los Angeles, Thorn has spearheaded initiatives aimed at combatting child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on the internet since its inception in 2012. The nonprofit’s tool, Safer, is an innovative solution that encompasses detection, mitigation, and reporting of CSAM. It utilizes advanced hashing technology to identify known CSAM by comparing images and videos against a comprehensive database that contains over 29 million hash values of confirmed CSAM. Since its deployment, Safer has successfully flagged over 2.8 million potential CSAM files across various platforms.

Hive, renowned for its cloud-based AI services that cater to content moderation, processes billions of content pieces each month. These services help shield users from various forms of harmful online content including sexual content, violence, drugs, and hate speech. However, detecting and mitigating CSAM remained a challenging area that Hive had yet to address—until now.

Kevin Guo, CEO and Co-founder of Hive, expressed optimism about the partnership, highlighting that integrating Safer will broaden the scope of their AI’s capabilities in making the internet safer for children. Hive’s advanced AI models, which are used by hundreds of prominent online communities, aim at lessening manual efforts in content moderation and minimizing human moderators’ exposure to harmful content.

The integration of Safer into Hive’s services will not only enhance Hive’s content moderation offerings but also extend the reach of Thorn’s child protection technology to an even wider array of online environments. This means that platforms utilizing Hive’s technology will soon have access to effective CSAM detection and mitigation tools, helping them play a more active role in curtailing the spread of harmful materials.

Julie Cordua, CEO at Thorn, underscores the impact of the collaboration, stating that universal access to tools like Safer is crucial for eliminating the vast spread of child sexual abuse materials across the internet. She further emphasized the potential of this partnership to significantly scale efforts in protecting children and bolstering the roles that technology and collective action play in disrupting the proliferation of CSAM.

This alliance represents a critical advancement in the ongoing battle against online child exploitation. By combining the strengths of Thorn’s specialized tools with Hive’s extensive reach across numerous platforms, this partnership promises to make significant headway in safeguarding children from the dangers of CSAM and contributing to a safer digital environment for users worldwide.