Facebook, Google and Twitter join forces to battle child pornography

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and Yahoo have joined forces to work with Britain's Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to implement a new system to detect images of child pornography online.

The charitable foundation, IWF,  has introduced a new technology that enables it to tag images of sexual abuse with distinct hashes -- sort of codes that act like a digital fingerprint, according to The Verge.

The hash is generated by an algorithm; once assigned to an image, it's unique to it, making it easy to identify a specific image against a list of offending hashes. The IWF keeps a record of all the hashes, which it has only shared with the five tech companies so far, but plans to roll out to other IWF members soon.