Thorn – Drive Tech Innovation to Fight Child Sexual Exploitation | Hacker News Reader

Thorn – Drive Tech Innovation to Fight Child Sexual Exploitation

wearethorn.org

56 pointsr3bl13 comments

Seeing that Ashton Kutcher is a co-founder brought to mind his feud with the Village Voice a few years ago over the VV's escort ads, which Kutcher alleged were facilitating child prostitution and sex slavery. The VV then published a long investigative piece arguing that Kutcher's statistical claims -- e.g. that 100,000 to 300,000 U.S. children are sold into sex slavery each year -- was off by several orders of magnitude: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/real-men-get-their-facts-st...

And of course it should be said, VV, which was and is undergoing huge financial stress, has every incentive to believe its hands are clean, as it was desperate for the revenue from escort ads.

Hard to tell if Kutcher has revised his numbers. The Thorn site is vague about its numbers. It talks about hundreds of thousands of kids at risk, and on the about page, fuzzes the claim with "100,000 escort ad posted in the United States every day, and within these, there are ads that represent children."...the unsaid implication being that the number of escort ads per day may not have any real bearing on the actual number of children at risk.

It might seem pedantic to care about stats when children are at risk, but the purported goal of this Thorn initiative is to "use tech to fight child sexual exploitation", and its pages make as much mention about data science as the average tech startup press release. But worthwhile data science requires good data, not platitudes. It's not as if the fight against child abuse is as simple as throwing tech and computational resources at it, nor is that even necessarily the most efficient way to fight the problem.

Agreed. And it's not pedantic. First, taking care with stats and claims lends lots of credibility with the people they want help from. Also, having solid numbers helps people start to quantify the problems and think about solutions that will meaningfully impact those numbers.

I don't see scrutinizing apparently fictional "statistics" as an exercised in pedantry in the slightest. People who can't be bothered to as you say, find or generate good data and are content with bad data are not people you should trust with money, or important tasks. From a random celebrity like Kutcher, it's understandable and expected at least; if someone expects him to be rigorous they might be new to the planet.

News outlets and other users of that stat by contrast, have much more to answer for.

I’m a software engineer at Thorn. I don’t work directly on the research or data science side of things, but I work closely with those who do and they take it very seriously. Here’s some more detail from our website: https://www.wearethorn.org/child-sexual-exploitation-and-tec...

Has anyone here worked with them or have more color to add?

Some of the problems they mention I know are already being worked on by other organizations.

How do they work with the FBI and the NCMEC? Do they work with local law enforcement?

I have worked with them in the past.

One of the key things was that they managed to get every company in the tech task force to collaborate through things like shared hash databases; so if someone uploads child pornography to imgur, facebook or tumblr, they can all take advantage of the other's experience.

Then the tools they share with law enforcement allow them for instance to easily search personals posted around the web for dodgy ads, or search content in darknets.

My involvement was around a particular case in which we collaborated with an FBI special agent to try and catch a person who had posted images online abusing a very young child.

Due to the nature of the investigative process, we had to share more with them than they did with us. Not sure if we had a hand in it, but they told us that predator was arrested and the girl is now safe.

> Then the tools they share with law enforcement allow them for instance to easily search personals posted around the web for dodgy ads, or search content in darknets.

I wish organization like this would share the stats on how much traffic they generate when trawling "darknets", or at least talk with researchers who has tried to establish usage data on such networks.

They work with all three. https://www.wearethorn.org/blog/eliminating-child-sexual-abu...

https://www.wearethorn.org/blog/spotlight-tool-aids-in-recov...

I can't speak to the stats, but I was once part of the team that developed Thorn's Spotlight software. LEOs who use it say it's been a serious game-changer in their efforts to get the children and their traffickers off the streets.

Would be great to know more details about this as WhitneyLand already said. Like are there ways to contribute/join if you live in another country? Are they committed long term to do something or is this just PR? I don't have as much knowledge about the people as danso above.

They accept contributions from non-US nationals, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to join if your company is not already in the task force as mine was.

If you're interested in getting involved you can fill out a survey here: https://www.wearethorn.org/digital-defender-survey/

I'm a software engineer at Thorn, and I can assure you this is not just PR. We are committed to helping children in both the short and long term.

Thanks for the reply! Filled out the survey. Although I mistook the 'what are you looking for' and only chose one option, because right after the 'ok' (or similar) button popped up and I went to the next thing.

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