#Tech titans commit to curbing child exploitation on their platforms

Big tech companies are pledging to be transparent about child exploitation on their platforms as they look to continue expanding encryption.

The Technology Coalition, which includes titans like Facebook and Google, on Thursday said its 18-member companies would establish a “multi-million” dollar research fund to study patterns of abuse and develop tools to prevent it.

Silicon Valley’s biggest names have been heavily criticized for failures to protect their youngest users, with multiple governments arguing that encryption — which makes conversations totally private and inaccessible to law enforcement — allows criminals to operate with impunity.

“We’d love to move beyond just the numbers of reports that may be out there, to really understand what those reports mean,” Facebook’s global head of safety Antigone Davis said.

The coalition did not provide additional details about the measures it intends to take, and did not specify which metrics would be tracked.

Child welfare advocates say the number of known child sexual abuse images has soared from thousands to tens of millions in recent years, as predators have increasingly used social networks to groom victims and exchange explicit images.

The US-led “Five Eyes” alliance last year threatened to weaken legal protections and called on Facebook to suspend plans to extend end-to-end encryption across its messaging services.

Facebook generated more than 90% of US child sexual abuse reports online last year, according to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

With Post wires.