While states such as New York have recently passed legislation aimed at protecting children online, an alliance of global tech companies has been working for 18 years to combat child sexual exploitation and abuse on the internet.

One of the leaders of the Washington, D.C.-based Tech Coalition, which includes Google, Meta and TikTok, is Katia Potapov ’02, the group’s vice president of membership development.

“When the Tech Coalition opportunity came my way, I saw it as a fantastic opportunity to combine my professional experience with a focus on child safety. Knowing that my work could positively impact children while collaborating with global tech companies directly involved in this mission was incredibly motivating,” Potapov says.

“I think this is one of those issues that affects everyone. In some capacity, everybody has children in their lives with a phone or device in their hand. It’s not an issue that’s going away anytime soon.”

The problem is widespread. A 2022 study found that 16% of young adults in the U.S. experienced at least one type of sexual abuse online before age 18.

The Tech Coalition facilitates information sharing among platforms such as Google and Meta to develop best practices for preventing, detecting and reporting child exploitation. Potapov’s role is to add to the more than 40 companies, including smaller ones, that are coalition members.

One of the Coalition’s newest programs is Lantern. It enables participating tech companies to share signals of activity that violate their policies on child exploitation, so that the companies can find and respond more quickly to such content. Companies using Lantern have acted 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.

“Collaboration, information [and] knowledge sharing is really the value-add,” Potapov says.

“If the eradication and the mitigation of this issue is going to happen, it will be with the help of this Coalition. It’s pretty amazing - you’ve got companies that might be competitors or focused on different priorities on the outside but within the Coalition, they come together to collaborate on this very real problem.”

Potapov earned a bachelor’s degree with an interdisciplinary major (Concentration: Broadcast Meteorology), a minor in Russian and an interdisciplinary minor (Concentration: Climatology). She previously worked in real estate and other sectors but was drawn to the Coalition after having children of her own and doing volunteer work for youth organizations. Potapov says some of the skills she learned at UAlbany helped her take on challenges such as trying to rid the internet of predators.

UAlbany, she said, taught her about research and grit: “Try things out, and if it doesn’t work, pivot,” she says. “Find what you’re passionate about, ideally a mix of 80% things you’re inherently good at and 20% things that require new skills and challenges., This way, you know you’re constantly evolving and growing.”