The document, Voluntary Principles to Counter Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, includes 11 principles. It covers themes like targeting online grooming, preventing searches of child sexual abuse material and responding to evolving threats. According to a statement published by the DOJ, the principles are “intended to have sufficient flexibility to ensure effective implementation.”

“We hope the Voluntary Principles will spur collective action on the part of industry to stop one of the most horrendous crimes impacting some of the most vulnerable members of society,” said US Attorney General William Barr.

Many tech companies already have at least some measures to combat child exploitation. Recently, Facebook made its algorithms for flagging harmful photos and videos open-source and available on GitHub. Microsoft has shared its tool for reviewing chat-based conversations and detecting online grooming. Still, online child exploitation is a widespread and devastating problem.

Project Artemis reviews text-based conversations and evaluates whether they could be considered grooming. It assigns a rating, and companies can use those ratings to flag conversations for review by human moderators.

The project began in November 2018 at a Microsoft “360 Cross-Industry Hackathon.” Since then, Microsoft, The Meet Group, Roblox, Kik, Thorn and others have helped build the tool. Beginning tomorrow, January 10th, licensing will be handled by Thorn, a nonprofit that builds tech to defend children from sexual abuse.

In a blog post announcing Project Artemis, Microsoft wrote:

“Project Artemis” is a significant step forward, but it is by no means a panacea. Child sexual exploitation and abuse online and the detection of online child grooming are weighty problems. But we are not deterred by the complexity and intricacy of such issues. On the contrary, we are making the tool available at this point in time to invite further contributions and engagement from other technology companies and organizations with the goal of continuous improvement and refinement.

Microsoft is not the only Big Tech company fighting child exploitation and abuse. Last year, YouTube pulled hundreds of channels and disabled comments on tens of millions of videos after reports suggested a child porn ring existed on the platform. Facebook has said it uses machine learning to fight child exploitation, and the Tumblr app was once removed from the App Store when images depicting child sexual abuse got past its filters.