In 2022, Art4Giving donated to Thorn, the widely-recognized nonprofit organization dedicated to developing new technologies to combat child sexual abuse online.
Thorn was founded in 2012 by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore. Since then, Thorn’s tools have helped identify over 20,000 children online and have been used by more than 2,500 agencies worldwide.
Thorn houses the first engineering and data science team focused solely on developing new technologies to fight child sexual abuse online. Their team possesses a deep technical knowledge and subject matter expertise to innovate and deploy new technology solutions around their three strategic pillars: accelerating victim identification, equipping platforms, and empowering the public.
“Nowadays, privacy-enhancing technologies are being abused in furtherance of child exploitation. This is terrible, and there’s no easy fix, but Thorn is working hard to push back on the problem. I support their noble effort.”
– Ross Ulbricht
Silk Road strictly prohibited the sharing or sale of child pornography. In 2020, after reading an article about WhatsApp’s child abuse problem, Ross published ZKANN, his idea for a new technology using cryptography and artificial intelligence that would help fight the uploading of such content on encrypted platforms, while still preserving individual privacy. Unfortunately, without access to a computer, Ross cannot develop this further in prison. More recently, after reading another article about the same pervasive issue on Wickr, Amazon’s encrypted chat app, Ross shared ZKANN once more, with the hope that someone could bring it to the attention of people with the resources to develop it.