fbpx

CSIP Leads Facebook, Google, and Twitter in New Coalition to Fight Opioid Epidemic

At a meeting held in Washington, DC, on November 13th, leaders from three technology companies met with experts to form a new coalition to “share best practices and collaborate on ways to address opioid addiction.” Recognizing the rising public health threat of opioid addiction and overdose in the US, CSIP members Facebook, Google, and Twitter, are forming Tech Together to Fight the Opioid Crisis and will work to leverage new “proactive-detection” technology that is powered by artificial intelligence and can help detect drug-related images and content before they are seen by consumers.

CSIP will be leading this new coalition as part of its ongoing efforts to protect consumers from the illicit sale of online drugs. Highlights of the meeting included presentations from the technology companies. Susan Molinari, lead for policy and government relations at Google, shared how “50,000 searches about specific opioid drugs were made each day on the search engine.” Kevin Martin, head of US public policy at Facebook, shared updates on Facebook’s efforts to use AI to “detect content that includes images of drugs and depicts the intent to sell with information such as price, phone numbers or usernames for other social media accounts.”

The coalition will work with the Computer Forensic Research Lab at the University of Alabama in Birmingham to better keep abreast of how bad actors use the internet and also the new street names for drugs.

Read the media coverage on the event:

Facebook, Google and Twitter Formed Tech Together to Fight the Opioid CrisisAdWeek

Facebook is using AI to identify potential drug dealersTech Radar

Facebook and Instagram use AI to spot drug dealersTechnology Intelligence

View the CSIP media release about the new coalition here.