I’ve seen video content of a child that’s the same age as mine being raped by an American man in Cambodia,” an emotional Kutcher said. “I’ve been on FBI raids where I’ve seen things that no person should ever see. Through his work with Thorn, Kutcher detailed a number of horrific and heartbreaking scenarios he’s witnessed. It is sold for the momentary happiness of another.”Īs Kutcher, the father of two young children, detailed in his testimony, an estimated 27 million people worldwide, including children, are trapped in forced labor and sexual exploitation. “The right to pursue happiness for so many is stripped away. It’s a simple notion - the right to pursue happiness,” Kutcher said in his opening remarks. “I’m here today to defend the right to pursue happiness. The Task Force is now the largest industry group of its kind – with over 25 companies participating – and to-date it has helped guide the development of many of Thorn’s programs including the development of the Thorn Sound Practices Guide, the industry hash-sharing initiative and Thorn’s online child sexual abuse deterrence programs which have reached more than two million people.Ashton Kutcher is sticking to his day job - and no, that’s not acting.Īs the chairman and co-founder of Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children - a technology company that works to eradicate child exploitation - Kutcher passionately testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations Wednesday in an effort to help end so-called modern slavery and trafficking. In 2010, with the leadership of Ron Conway, founder of SV Angel, Thorn created a Technology Task Force to focus on collaboration and information sharing to improve the use of technology to combat child sexual exploitation. The Lab is a natural next step, given Thorn’s deep roots in Silicon Valley. In its initial year, the Lab will include several full-time engineering and data science staff members and will leverage fellowships, internships, university and corporate partnerships and hack-a-thons to achieve its goals. We are proud to lead this investment in Thorn to help create a center 100% dedicated to creating good applications of technology that will help protect children, find victims and stop abusive behavior.” “, our philanthropic arm, has invested nearly $20 million in organizations fighting child exploitation and human trafficking. At Google, we have taken many proactive steps to stop our platforms from being used for this type of abuse,” said Susan Molinari, Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations at Google.
“Unfortunately, all too often individuals have chosen to use the Internet to exploit children. Concepts generated through the Lab will be directly deployed through Thorn’s programmatic work or through the work of its partners.
Ashton kutcher co founder of digital defender of children series#
Technically, these initiatives will span a wide variety of engineering and analysis topics relevant to cybersecurity and intelligence, including adaptive crawling, statistical analysis, search, machine learning (image processing, natural language processing, time series analysis), entity resolution, data pipeline development, UX design and API design. The Lab’s initial areas of focus include child sex trafficking, dark web child abuse and exploitation, and social platform cybersafety. “Our focus at Thorn, and especially through the Lab, is to harness the best and the brightest minds in technology to be a part of the solution and create proactive tools to stop this abuse.” “Technology plays a huge role in child sexual exploitation and we are committed to making the Internet a more hostile environment for predators,” said Ashton Kutcher, Co-Founder, Thorn. The companies will participate through financial donations and by providing expertise, guidance and engineering support.
The Thorn Innovation Lab has partnered with tech industry giants including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Expedia, IAC, Sabre, Twitter, Amazon Web Services ( AWS) and Pinterest. The Lab will serve as a physical think tank for a team of engineers and data scientists to research technologies, create partnerships and build innovative technology solutions to fight child sexual exploitation. Thorn: Digital Defenders of Children, a non-profit organization dedicated to driving technology innovation to fight child sexual exploitation, announced today the launch of The Thorn Innovation Lab in Silicon Valley.