This is the first installment in our series: “20 Years in Online Safety: Reflecting, Evolving, and Adapting” leading up to the 20th anniversary of Resolver’s presence in the Trust & Safety community on Nov. 25, 2025. Originally launched as Crisp Thinking in November 2005, we have had multiple generations of online safety professionals carry the mission forward. For this series, we asked a range of our team, managers, and leadership to remind us of the journey we’ve taken so far, and the road ahead, as we continue in our core mission to protect children online.
A changing landscape
When Resolver’s Trust & Safety division was founded as Crisp Thinking in 2005, we were one of few early trust and safety pioneers navigating the uncharted challenge of online child protection. Our first partners posed a deceptively simple question: “How can we detect grooming behavior across thousands of individual text messages?” Twenty years later, child safety remains at the heart of our efforts. The scale of the challenge, and our work, has grown beyond all expectations.
From the beginning, predators shifted tactics as soon as we closed a gap. We would detect a popular grooming method, enable our partners to eliminate it, and within a few days, the method would change — again, and again, and again. This relentless cat-and-mouse has demanded that we match the best efforts of those who seek to harm children at every turn.
For two decades, Resolver’s technology and people have charted an ever-changing path across the online landscape. We leverage every tool available to safeguard children, based on the behaviors we can discern in the moment. And we pivot rapidly when trends, coded language, or the feature exploitation of the day changes. Our ability to anticipate the next shift, and to help our partners prepare for emerging threats, has been critical to enabling a proactive approach.
Generating lift
In the face of immense online safety challenges, we found ways to move faster and farther.
- Our dedicated Risk Detection team developed a comprehensive taxonomy of behaviors.
- Our Engineers rebuilt and augmented our tools countless times.
- Our Analysts and Subject Matter Experts embedded themselves into the dark underbelly of the internet, moving into predictive analysis.
- Our Graph Data Science team developed proprietary algorithms to map and model how to fragment bad actor networks.
- Our Recruitment team made sure we could hire the best for the mission.
We built powerful partnerships along the way with many organizations, including the Internet Watch Foundation, INHOPE, WeProtect Global Alliance, and the Online Safety Tech Industry Association. Our growth was allied with greater precision and focus. We stay close to where harm originates and bad actors operate. This sharpened approach reduces drag and has enabled our momentum, evolving from a scrappy craft of founding engineers into a global flagship with operational teams in three continents.
Forward motion
While the fundamental threats haven’t changed, how they manifest continues to evolve and threaten safety online. Since 2005, Resolver’s Trust & Safety division has expanded from child protection to cover all online harms: equally capable of supporting across violent extremism and hate, harassment, graphic violence, information operations, self-harm, and more.
We all now face multiple metastasizing threats. With newer issues like Com Networks, we see child abuse infused with sadism and extremist ideologies. With new technologies, we’ve also seen a resurgence in the sharing of nonconsensual intimate imagery. Hate speech and information operations continue to fuel division and community risk.
And yet our mission is unchanged. The nature of the threat has elevated the services we provide. From our early tactical work finding individual bad actors (which continues), we now deliver strategic support to Enforcement teams, to Policy, Product, Engineering, and Executives. We are deeply embedded into safety-by-design and safety-by-default processes for some of the largest platforms in the world. Increasingly, we also support regulators to understand the systemic nature of the risks we trace, and we are a core stakeholder in “signal sharing” across the tech sector.
While change brings opportunities, it invariably presents new challenges. AI, for instance, poses well documented risks to the online ecosystem, but it also offers hope and new possibilities in previously dark areas. Resolver’s newly launched Unknown CSAM Detection Service leverages cutting edge machine learning capabilities and the deep partnerships we have built over 20 years to bring a genuinely game-changing tool to the fight against child exploitation online. This is the latest wave of threat and innovation which we are harnessing in the most powerful way we can to protect platforms, technology service providers and users online. We are deeply proud to still be running point in this endeavor.
In 2025, continued forward motion in child safety requires a depth of collaboration unlike anything before — and we are committed to leading from the front.
The mission is personal
Resolver, and our mission of online child safety, will always be about people. Our deeply purpose-driven teams of technical specialists, analysts, program managers, engineers, creatives, and more — make progress possible every day.
Thank you for all that you have done, and continue to do, to keep children and other vulnerable users safe. Leading Resolver today is an enormous privilege with huge responsibility to our partners, and ultimately to children across the world.
And to our partners across platforms, technology service providers, regulators, governments, NGOs and our many stakeholders and cross-sector initiative friends: thank you for your trust, collaboration and continued support. At a time when so much of the Trust & Safety world feels misjudged and under invested, we remain steadfast. The quiet, difficult work continues — often out of sight, deep in the fog — but always moving forward.
Two decades in, the mission remains clearer than ever: keep children safe, no matter how the winds change.
As we reflect on two decades of protecting children and safeguarding online spaces we’re also looking ahead to the next frontier of Trust & Safety: the proactive, intelligent elimination of CSAM.
Resolver’s new Unknown CSAM Detection Service represents the culmination of 20 years of learning, evolving, and purpose. It’s built to identify, prevent, and remove child sexual abuse material at speed and scale, while protecting humans behind the screen.
Learn more about how we’re redefining child safety for the next generation.
