TikTok US joins industry coalition to track online child exploitation

Launched in 2023, the Lantern program serves as a collaborative defense network where companies exchange data to identify bad actors as they migrate between services. With the addition of TikTok, the coalition now covers a vast majority of the major social media and communication landscape. Lantern reports that its members have already shared over 2 million signals of potentially harmful behavior, a volume expected to grow through 2025 as the network matures.

Beyond data sharing, the company is committing $2 million to support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. This funding assists the modernization of the NCMEC CyberTipline, a project aiming to integrate advanced automation and analysis tools. By cutting manual processing times, the center hopes to accelerate the delivery of actionable reports to law enforcement. The broader initiative requires $10 million in total funding and involves additional support from technology partners including AWS and Palantir.