Technology platforms, digital rights nonprofits, law enforcement agencies, and policymakers all agree on very few things. But on that short list is the moral imperative to fight child pornography.
The Scale of the Problem
In 2023, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) received over 36.2 million reports containing over 105 million files. While some tools exist to help workers sift through them, much is still done manually—a task that is slow, tedious, and emotionally challenging.
Innovative Solutions
Rebecca Portnoff, vice president of data science at Thorn, has spent the past decade trying to solve this problem. She leads a team of data scientists who apply machine learning algorithms to identify child pornography, spot potential victims, and flag grooming behaviors.
Portnoff developed Safer, a tool that lets tech platforms and frontline organizations scan images for known examples of child pornography using cryptographic and perceptual hashing, then report them to NCMEC. A new version of the tool also incorporates natural language processing to identify text conversations aimed at grooming new victims.
Emerging Threats
Portnoff also keeps an eye on emerging threats, such as generative AI. Current tools typically combat child pornography by comparing files to already identified images or videos. They are not designed to detect newly created ones, nor can they distinguish between real and AI-generated images of victims.
Collaborative Efforts
Portnoff put together a working group to study the impact of generative AI, and co-published a paper with the Stanford Internet Observatory that documented an uptick in AI-generated child pornography. As a result, she drafted guidelines for preventing AI tools from generating and spreading child pornography and persuaded 10 big tech and AI companies to commit to its principles.
Conclusion
It’s this systems approach to tackling the problem at all stages—from identifying harmful content that’s already out there, to making it harder to create more—that will ultimately make the difference, Portnoff says, so that “we’re not always playing Whac-A-Mole.”
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