Thorn and Hive Expand Partnership to Combat Surge of CSAM on Digital Platforms

November 21, 2024 at 09:00 AM EST

AI model now available through Hive offers unified API solution capable of identifying both known and new CSAM content

Thorn, a nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse and exploitation, and Hive, a leading provider of cloud-based AI solutions including content moderation models used by hundreds of leading online communities, today announced the release of an API able to detect known, new, and previously unknown child sexual abuse material (CSAM) on digital platforms. The announcement expands on the organizations’ partnership announced in April 2024 and existing hashing and matching integration capabilities. By leveraging Thorn's expertise in child protection and Hive's cutting-edge AI capabilities, this integrated solution provides an effective and efficient approach to identifying and addressing CSAM within digital ecosystems.

Thorn's Safer is a comprehensive solution that detects known, new, and previously unknown CSAM for every platform with an upload button. To date, Hive’s implementation of Safer has provided Hive customers the ability to identify CSAM through hashing and matching against a database that aggregates more than 57 million CSAM hash values. Since 2019, Safer has identified over 6 million potential CSAM files on customer platforms. The new release provides a single API additionally integrating Safer’s capabilities to detect CSAM imagery beyond content already existing in the database. Hive will distribute Safer to customers through Hive’s cloud-based APIs.

"Digital platforms are experiencing a surge of risks to mitigate, including new challenges in identifying and removing CSAM,” said Kevin Guo, Co-founder and CEO of Hive. "Our expanded partnership with Thorn demonstrates Hive’s continued commitment to providing our customers with the industry’s most comprehensive AI-powered solution for proactive content moderation.”

Hive's AI-powered content moderation solution processes billions of pieces of online content every month for hundreds of online platforms. The expanded partnership further augments Hive’s capabilities to detect CSAM and complements the company’s ability to protect users and human moderators from exposure to sexual content, violence and gore, drugs, and hate speech, as well as to identify potential misinformation risks from deepfakes and AI-generated content.

Thorn’s machine learning classification models are trained in part using trusted data from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children’s (NCMEC) CyberTipline. This high-quality data helps Thorn's models predict if image and video content contains CSAM.

"Protecting children in the digital age requires innovative solutions that evolve as quickly as the threats they face," said Julie Cordua, CEO of Thorn. "Our expanded partnership with Hive demonstrates how collaboration is a powerful way to combat CSAM at scale. Together, we're making it possible for platforms of any size to implement robust protection measures and contribute to building a safer digital world for children."

Learn more about Safer.

Learn more about Thorn.

Learn more about Hive.

About Thorn

Thorn is a nonprofit that builds technology to defend children from sexual abuse. Founded in 2012, the organization creates products and programs to empower the platforms and people who have the ability to defend children. Thorn's tools have helped the tech industry detect and report millions of child sexual abuse files on the open web, connected investigators and NGOs with critical information to help them solve cases faster and remove children from harm, and provided parents and youth with digital safety resources to prevent abuse. To learn more about Thorn's mission to defend children from sexual abuse, visit thorn.org.

About Hive

Hive is the leading provider of cloud-based AI solutions to understand, search, and generate content, and is trusted by hundreds of the world's largest and most innovative organizations. The company empowers developers with a portfolio of best-in-class, pre-trained AI models, serving billions of customer API requests every month. Hive also offers turnkey software products powered by proprietary AI models and datasets, unlocking breakthrough applications for critical business needs with deep learning and generative AI. Collectively, Hive's technology is transforming approaches to platform integrity / content moderation (including AI-generated content detection), brand protection, sponsorship measurement, context-based ad targeting, and more.