Offenders exploit gaps between platforms, services, jurisdictions, and industries to evade detection and continue harming children online. Because online child sexual exploitation and abuse (OCSEA) often spans multiple services, no single company can effectively address this threat alone. 

Lantern was created to strengthen cross-platform collaboration against OCSEA. Participating companies can securely share signals related to violative activity, helping identify harmful behavior and content that may have otherwise gone undetected, uncover patterns of abuse, and strengthen enforcement across platforms and services. 

Launched in 2023, Lantern has evolved into a growing industry infrastructure supporting coordination action against online child exploitation. 

Signals are threat indicators, intelligence, or other information associated with OCSEA that may help participating companies identify harmful activity on their platforms. Participating companies determine which signals to share and ingest based on their policies, legal obligations, use cases, and assessments of relevance.

Content-based signals relate to material being shared online, including known child sexual abuse material (CSAM), grooming manuals, or other illegal images, video, audio or text.

Examples include:

• Hashes of known CSAM that can be used to detect and prevent redistribution 
• URLs linking to webpages that host OCSEA content 
• Keywords or codewords used by offenders to evade detection in sharing or engaging with CSAM.

Incident-based signals relate to  behavior, interactions, or events that violate child safety policies. 

Examples include:

• Reports of repeated unsolicited contact with minors
• Attempts to move conversations with minors off-platform
• Payment requests or extortion language targeting minors

By sharing these signals, participating companies can better detect evolving threats and identify offenders attempting to exploit gaps between.

Financially motivated abuse, including financial sextortion and the commercial distribution of CSAM, increasingly rely on cross border payment systems and digital financial services.

Participating financial institutions engage with Lantern on a receive-only basis, meaning they can ingest relevant signals shared by participating tech companies to support investigations to potential violations of their own policies and terms of services. 

The Tech Coalition continues to take a measured and risk-based approach to financial sector participation, evaluating each institution individually to ensure compliance with Lantern’s legal, operational, privacy, and security requirements.  

• Accounts engaged in grooming or solicitation of minors to create explicit content
• Indicators of financial sextortion
• Patterns suggesting coordinate abuse across services.

By sharing these signals, companies help one another detect evolving threats, and respond more effectively – closing the gaps predators can exploit between platforms.