Credit: DANIEL CONSTANTE / Shutterstock TikTok’s US business has joined Lantern, a program that lets tech companies share warning signs about people who sexually exploit children as they move from one platform to another, TechCrunch reported. The member is TikTok USDS Joint Venture, a majority-American-owned company formed in January to operate TikTok in the US. ByteDance retained a 19.9% stake, and Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX each hold 15%. Lantern, launched in 2023, lets members securely exchange signals such as accounts, links, or content tied to abuse, so a predator banned on one service can be spotted on another.
Members include Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Snap, Discord, Roblox, Reddit, X, Twitch, and Anthropic. Participating companies shared more than two million signals of potentially violating behavior by the end of 2025, according to Lantern. Its director, Marc Leone, said TikTok’s participation would strengthen coordinated enforcement across the industry. Most of TikTok’s big rivals were already members, so the move brings one of the largest youth-focused platforms into a system its competitors were using without it.
TikTok’s US venture is also giving $2m to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to help modernize its CyberTipline, the channel through which US companies must report child sexual abuse material they find. TikTok says the money will pay for search, automation, and analysis tools that should halve manual processing time and get usable reports to police faster. The upgrade will run for three years at a total cost of $10m, with backing from AWS, Microsoft, and Palantir.
