Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge
Meta, Snap, and TikTok have founded a new program called Thrive to help stop the spread of graphic content depicting or encouraging self-harm and suicide. Thrive enables participating companies to share “signals” to alert each other of violating content on their platforms.
Thrive is built in conjunction with the Mental Health Coalition, a charitable organization that says it works to remove the stigma around mental health discussions. Meta says it provides the technical infrastructure behind Thrive that enables “signals to be shared securely.” It uses the same cross-platform signal sharing tech used in the Lantern program, which is designed to help fight child abuse online. Participating companies can share hashes that match the…