A simpler path to a safer Internet: an update to our CSAM scanning tool

Launching a website or an online community brings people together to create and share. The operators of these platforms, sadly, also have to navigate what happens when bad actors attempt to misuse those destinations to spread the most heinous content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

We are committed to helping anyone on the Internet protect their platform from this kind of misuse. We first launched a CSAM Scanning Tool several years ago to give any website on the Internet the ability to programmatically scan content uploaded to their platform for instances of CSAM in partnership with National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), Interpol, and dozens of other organizations committed to protecting children. That release took technology that was only available to the largest social media platforms and provided it to any website.

However, the tool we offered still required setup work that added friction to its adoption. To help our customers file reports to NCMEC, they needed to create their own credentials. That step of creating credentials and sharing them was too confusing or too much work for small site owners. We did our best helping them with secondary reports, but we needed a method that made Continue reading