How the new Thorn mission shapes our next chapter.

Our children are growing up in a digital world, and predators are taking advantage of this new reality—exploiting children in these digital spaces and creating new vulnerabilities for them. 

Every day, hundreds of thousands of images and videos of children suffering some of the worst sexual abuse imaginable are being shared online, while the child victims wait to be found. Last year alone, more than 100 files of child sexual abuse material were reported each minute.

New threats like financial sextortion and deepfake nudes are continually emerging, while persistent dangers like online grooming are accelerating.

A recent Thorn survey found that 40% of kids aged 9-17 have been approached online in an attempt to befriend and manipulate them. To put it into perspective, that’s approximately 710,000 kids in the San Francisco Bay area being targeted for grooming.

The scale, severity, and persistent growth of this problem make it clear: child sexual exploitation and abuse is a global public health crisis that demands an urgent, coordinated response.

Our children cannot wait.

This heartbreaking reality demands a more comprehensive approach to protecting children, which is why we’re introducing our next chapter with a new Thorn mission statement: to transform how children are protected from sexual abuse and exploitation in the digital age.

We are building a digital safety net for children—a multi-layered protection strategy for the digital world. While playgrounds have been designed with safety surfaces and cars equipped with safety restraints, the digital spaces where children now spend so much of their time remain dangerously unprotected.

Our digital safety net addresses this urgent gap through cutting-edge technology, original research, and collaborative partnerships. It creates multiple layers of protection that work together to transform how children are protected by:

• Creating safer online environments and making the internet an unwelcoming place for abuse.
• Reducing the time it takes for investigators to find child victims and remove them from harm.
• Empowering the broader child protection community with the latest research and technical resources to better combat abuse.

To accomplish this transformation, we’ve identified four pillars on which our work will focus going forward. Together, these pillars create an integrated framework for moving the entire child safety ecosystem forward. 

Four pillars to support the new Thorn mission.

Research and Insights
Understanding the rapidly changing nature of child sexual abuse and exploitation is fundamental to our mission. At Thorn, we don’t just respond to threats—we get ahead of them through rigorous research that centers on the experiences of young people themselves and developing safety frameworks to address these threats.

With our novel research, we’re not just gathering insights—we’re driving awareness and action across platforms, NGOs, policymakers, and law enforcement agencies worldwide. By mapping digital threats and developing safety frameworks for critical technologies, we are creating a foundation for all our work and accelerating the responsiveness of the entire child protection ecosystem.

Technical Innovation
Technological advances that create new risks can also be our most powerful protection tools. At Thorn, our world-class machine learning engineers harness the power of AI to build detection tools and safety technologies that continually improve and keep pace with emerging harms.

This technical innovation is a critical part of our digital safety net, as it powers our other pillars, providing the essential tools for child victim identification and platform safety solutions. We remain at the forefront of child protection technology by maintaining and continually enhancing our image, video, and text classification capabilities while also addressing emerging threats with new technological solutions.

Child Victim Identification
Behind every image or video of abuse is a real child waiting to be found and protected from harm. When a child is in an active abuse situation, every moment matters—yet investigators face a daunting needle-in-a-haystack challenge, sifting through overwhelming volumes of digital evidence to find the children who need help most urgently. In any case, finding relevant, actionable information quickly is essential for protecting a victim; whether an investigator is sorting through millions of images and messages on the dark web to identify child victims being actively abused, or triaging the thousands of cases in their jurisdiction reported through NCEMC’s CyberTipline.

Our newest product, Thorn Detect, is a powerful tool in forensic investigations. It helps investigators prioritize the most critical files amid overwhelming case volumes by quickly detecting potential child sexual abuse images and videos. The feedback we’ve received confirms what we’ve always believed: when we equip the frontlines with better technology, more children are found faster and removed from harmful situations. I’m particularly proud that our victim identification tools are now being used in 36 countries worldwide, across 700 law enforcement agencies, creating a truly global impact for children in danger.

Platform Safety
Every time an image or video of child sexual abuse is shared online, it perpetuates trauma for the victim. That’s why our platform safety pillar is dedicated to combating child sexual abuse and exploitation across the open web by equipping tech platforms with purpose-built solutions and expert consulting.

In 2024, our impact in this area reached an unprecedented scale:

• Over 4.1 million suspected CSAM files were detected using our tools
• More than 112 billion total files were processed through our detection technology
• 60+ companies are now using Thorn’s CSAM detection products to create safer digital environments

Looking forward

This evolution of our mission isn’t just about responding to today’s threats—it’s about building a sustainable framework that can adapt as technology advances. The four pillars work together, each strengthening the others: research informs our technology development, which powers victim identification and platform safety solutions.

Our dual-income model means three out of the four pillars are primarily philanthropically funded. The revenue from our tech industry products supports platform safety, while research and insights, technical innovation, and child victim identification rely on donor support to reach our goals. 

We have lofty ambitions for 2025. This includes continuing to expand our Safety by Design initiative for generative AI, releasing new and updated research about youth’s experiences with sextortion and other online threats, and continuing to build advanced detection tools.

As we pursue our new mission, I invite you to join us and help transform how we protect kids in the digital age. Together, we can build a world where every child is free to simply be a kid.

Thank you for your unwavering commitment to this mission and the children we serve.