Guest post by Stewart Wright, Senior Manager, Marketing and Communications at Netsweeper
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed how critical remote learning is for education and how students are facing increasing exposure to safeguarding risks.
Children are facing many changes and challenges from their regular routine. As schools, parks, recreational facilities and more become altered or remain closed because of COVID-19, students are feeling increasingly isolated and anxious.
There has also been a significant rise in the number of human traffickers and predators looking to exploit children online. With anti-trafficking organizations and charities struggling to survive and support victims, online safety has never been more of a necessity.
“There’s a lot of challenges on the internet — social media, online bullying, extreme content and much more. This type of content is affecting the mental health of our children.”
Perry Roach, Netsweeper CEO
How Does Netsweeper Protect Students Online?
At the core of Netsweeper’s technology is an ‘Artificial Intelligence Engine’ that has been developed to scan and categorise the content posted on new web pages when seen by anyone filtered by a Netsweeper solution, globally.
As new pages are scanned, this AI engine will determine which category the content falls under and will then link the URL with the appropriate categorization information back to Netsweeper’s network of global Category Naming Servers (CNS). This process takes seconds to perform.
As a result, appropriate allow-deny decisions can be made in ‘near real-time’ despite the web page having never been reviewed before. With millions of web pages being posted each day, this artificial intelligence engine has the capacity to keep pace with the massive growth of the internet and its content. As a result of this industry leading technology, Netsweeper has accrued and strategically categorised billions of URLs.
Netsweeper currently provides multilingual support in 46 languages and has categories that help schools protect and educate their students (for example, Extreme, Hate Speech, Criminal Skills, Weapons are categories that help monitor radical influences on students).
Find out more about WebScreen and HomeProtect.
