TikTok’s U.S. Arm Joins Lantern Child Safety Initiative, Pledges $2M to NCMEC
TikTok’s U.S. venture, TikTok USDS Joint Venture, is joining Lantern, a cross-platform child safety program whose members include Google, Meta and Microsoft, and is committing $2 million to NCMEC’s CyberTipline modernization.
Lantern, launched in 2023, helps social media companies securely share signals of harmful behavior and content so they can identify bad actors as they move from one platform to another. Its members include Google, X, Snap, Twitch, Anthropic, Meta, Discord, Microsoft, Apple, Roblox, Reddit and others.
“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 director Marc Leone said in a statement.
The decision aligns TikTok US with most of its competitors, which already participate in the program. Through 2025, Lantern says participant companies have shared more than 2 million signals of potentially violating behavior.
The U.S. venture has also been reporting to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s CyberTipline when it becomes aware of child sexual abuse material and other threats to children’s safety, as legally required of U.S.-based companies. It is now committing $2 million to NCMEC’s efforts to modernize the CyberTipline.
TikTok said in a press release that the 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.”
The NCMEC project is expected to take three years and $10 million, with partners including AWS, Microsoft and Palantir also contributing resources.