Running Toward a Fire

The problem is widespread.

Sixteen percent of young adults in the U.S. experienced at least one type of sexual abuse online before age 18, according to a 2022 University of New Hampshire study.

In 2024, University of Edinburgh researchers estimated that 300 million children globally had been affected by online sexual abuse and exploitation in the previous 12 months. That study also found that 11% of U.S. men said they engaged in online behaviors at some point in their lifetime that could be classified as child sexual abuse offending.

Also in 2024, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signed legislation that made her state the first to require social media platforms to display content chronologically by default for kids under 18, rather than using algorithms.

Arenson got some sense of the problem beginning in 2010. After four years of spam, malware and cybercriminal enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission, Arenson became a computer crimes prosecutor at the U.S. Justice Department. Cases involved data breaches, fraud and other high-tech crimes.

It was work presaged to Arenson when he was a kid.

“My father worked at Wang computers back in the day. So I got my first desktop computer when I was still in elementary school and have just been hooked on technology ever since and always wanted a career in technology,” he says.

The focus on online sexual exploitation of children became a major part of Arenson’s work after he joined the board of the Tech Coalition and particularly after he became the board chair in 2023.

The coalition of some 40 companies facilitates information sharing among platforms such as Google and Meta in order to identify people online who might do children harm, and it facilitates the development of best practices to prevent and detect exploitation.

The Tech Coalition started as a largely volunteer organization.

“These were just employees of various tech companies who were united in the fight against child exploitation. But there was no career staff. There were just a bunch of us working together as volunteers to try to fight this problem and talk between platforms about how to get better at it,” Arenson recalls.

Then the Tech Coalition hired professional staff.

“I think it’s unlike any other organization that I belong to in that it is really where work gets done on child exploitation on a cross-company basis,” Arenson says. “It’s the kind of expertise that no company could buy. It is all of the really, really smart people volunteering their time to tackle really, really hard jobs.”

Katia Potapov, the coalition’s vice president of membership development, says “You’ve got companies that might be competitors or working on different priorities on the outside but coming together here and collaborating on this issue. You’ve got members from Google working with members from Amazon and everyone coming together to focus on a real-time need.”

Arenson says the coalition shares information even among companies that aren’t members.

“There’s no question in my mind that members and non-members who are mentored by members have significantly improved their ability to fight child exploitation because of the knowledge that is given away at the Tech Coalition,” he says. “This has been one of my big priorities as board chair, to give away as much as we possibly can of that knowledge that has been hard fought and earned by members.”

One of the coalition’s newest programs is Lantern. It enables tech companies to share signals of activity that violates their policies on child exploitation so that the companies can find and respond more quickly to such content. Companies using Lantern have taken action on more than 30,000 accounts for violations of policies prohibiting child sexual exploitation and abuse, and more than 1,200 individual uploads of child sexual exploitation or abuse material were removed.

In one case, Discord shared in Lantern information about a user it removed from its platform who appeared to be grooming minors to engage in sexual activity. Meta then found similar activity on its platform and removed multiple accounts operated by that user. Meta also determined that the user was likely involved in a sexual relationship with a minor and reported that to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children.

“That type of signal sharing has never been done in the child exploitation space, and I believe it is revolutionary,” says Arenson. He notes that in 2023, the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children received 36 million reports of suspected online child sexual exploitation. Most reports to the center are about images that show the sexual abuse of children as young as infants, some of which circulate on the internet millions of times around the globe.

“When you think about how prevalent this is, it’s very much a dark side of the internet that people don’t talk about,” Arenson says. “It is a huge, huge challenge. And this is the way to fight that.”

Other new initiatives include targeting financial sextortion and artificial intelligence.

The coalition developed a toolkit for members to address financial sextortion. Predators typically pose as young females, entice teen males into sharing sexually explicit images of themselves and then blackmail the males by threatening to share the images unless the males pay the predators.

The coalition is also working to understand how generative AI—the use of algorithms such as ChatGPT that can be used to create audio, images, text and videos—can be used to sexually exploit children.

“Through the Tech Coalition, we have a unique space to partner across industry with leaders committed to addressing this complex challenge and enhance our collective response,” says Tech Coalition board member Liz Thomas, director of public policy and digital safety at Microsoft, which is an original member of the coalition.

Arenson feels fortunate to have been introduced to computers early in life. Besides his professional work, he’s also a gamer and has dabbled in computer programming. Arenson says his time at GW honed his writing and research skills.

Arenson says he enjoys his work so much that reading about things such as artificial intelligence in his off time doesn’t feel like work at all.

“One of the things I really like about the tech sector is just how fast things change,” he says.

“What I had always wanted to do was work on things that are on the front page of the newspaper, things that made a difference. What is more important than protecting children?” he says. “I just wanted to be in the middle of things that people read about that I could say I was working on. And at least during my career, technology has been that.

“The technology is changing so fast and is so central to our lives. It is what is being talked about on a daily basis,” he says. Above all, Arenson says, it’s gratifying to have the chance to be in the middle of it and aid in the critical work of keeping children safe.   

  Photography: William Atkins