Eight months after it was spun out of TikTok, the social media platform’s U.S. unit, known as TikTok USDS Joint Venture, is joining Lantern, a cross-platform child safety program launched by the Tech Coalition with support from a large group of tech companies.
Lantern, launched in 2023, helps social media companies work together to securely share signals of harmful behavior and content in order to identify bad actors as they move across platforms. Members in the program include Google, X, Snap, Twitch, Anthropic, Meta, Discord, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox, Reddit, and more.
“Cross-platform collaboration is essential to identifying and disrupting child sexual exploitation and abuse, and TikTok USDS JV’s participation will help strengthen coordinated enforcement across the wider tech ecosystem,” Lantern’s director, Marc Leone, said in a statement.
It makes sense for TikTok USDS to join Lantern, given most of its competitors are already participants in the program. Through 2025, Lantern says that participant companies have shared over 2 million signals of potentially violating behavior.
As legally required of U.S.-based companies, TikTok’s U.S. venture has been reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC)’s CyberTipline when it becomes aware of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and other threats to children’s safety. The company is now also committing $2 million to NCMEC’s efforts to modernize its CyberTipline.
“This investment will help NCMEC deploy advanced search, automation, and analysis tools to detect harm sooner, cut manual processing times in half, and accelerate actionable reports to law enforcement when a child’s safety is on the line,” TikTok said in a press release.
This NCMEC project is expected to take three years and $10 million, with partners like AWS, Microsoft, and Palantir also contributing resources.
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Amanda Silberling is a senior writer at TechCrunch covering the intersection of technology and culture. She has also written for publications like Polygon, MTV, the Kenyon Review, NPR, and Business Insider. She is the co-host of Wow If True, a podcast about internet culture, with science fiction author Isabel J. Kim. Prior to joining TechCrunch, she worked as a grassroots organizer, museum educator, and film festival coordinator. She holds a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania and served as a Princeton in Asia Fellow in Laos.
You can contact or verify outreach from Amanda by emailing amanda@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at @amanda.100 on Signal.
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