TikTok’s US arm joins Lantern, a cross-platform child safety initiative

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 by a 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 US 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. Topics Social , TikTok When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission . This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Amanda Silberling Senior Writer 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. View Bio October 13 – 15 San Francisco Last day to book an exhibit table is September 18. Don’t miss out on high-impact leads, investor access, and a brand spotlight in Disrupt’s Expo Hall. BOOK NOW Most Popular Tilly Norwood’s press tour is going about as well as you’d expect for an AI Amanda Silberling A new kind of AI model from a ChatGPT inventor is thrilling developers Tim Fernholz OpenAI caught its models leaving notes to successors to hide bad behavior Rebecca Bellan Microsoft exec called AI scraping ‘the largest theft of labor in human history,’ new unredacted filings reveal Rebecca Bellan Automattic’s interim CEO and legal chief signed reciprocal severance deals during Mullenweg’s brief ouster Sarah Perez Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M Jagmeet Singh Clean tech startup Fluxnium found a way to tap 50,000 years’ worth of nuclear fuel Tim De Chant