How Thrive Began
NEW YORK (September 30, 2025) — The Mental Health Coalition (MHC) today released Thrive’s first annual report. Thrive is the world’s only cross-industry program designed to help stop the spread of suicide and self-harm content across internet platforms. The program’s goal is to increase industry collaboration, help prevent online challenges from spreading virally across the internet, and to help improve early detection of content that could potentially pose a safety risk.
Suicide and self-harm content online can appear in diverse forms, including viral challenges, text posts, visual media (images, videos and livestreams), and hashtags. This content is spread daily and these attempts are now further complicated via artificial intelligence. Each company has policies and procedures to address this content and uses technology and content moderation to identify and remove it as quickly as possible before it is exposed to other users. Thrive enables member companies to address this issue across platforms.
“Collaboration and impact are at the heart of The Mental Health Coalition. We are grateful the technology companies have joined together to launch this initiative as partners, united in addressing how suicide and self-harm affects users across their platforms. Any technology company that enables public engagement can facilitate access to this content, and we encourage them to be part of Thrive as it grows its collective impact,” said Kenneth Cole, Founder of The Mental Health Coalition.
“In our first year, these global companies have demonstrated a clear desire and commitment to address suicide and self-harm content on their platforms as partners rather than competitors,” said Dr. Dan Reidenberg, Director of Thrive. “The scale of the problem, the regulations, and the users who continuously try and evade detection and cause harm to others is what drives this collaboration to help save more lives.”
Thrive’s first Annual Report includes details covering the partner’s work during the year since Thrive launched on September 12, 2024.
· Membership in Thrive: The program launched with Meta, Snap Inc. and Tik Tok and soon after doubled in size to include Discord, Patreon and Pinterest.
· Operations: Over the first year, the partners developed a shared vision, mission, and set of values to guide their work. Operating Norms and a Code of Conduct were also developed.
· Operations and Key Milestones: The Annual Report outlines two key milestones accomplished in Thrive’s first year:
o Five productive and collaborative partner meetings to develop (1) a new, shared taxonomy; (2) the terms and definitions used cross-industry, for identifying potentially violating content; and (3) the types of signals to be shared. All of these assets were reviewed by the Thrive Director and other global experts.
· A new website was built and launched in July, 2025.
· Additional noteworthy achievements in Thrive’s Annual Report: A working group was created to update and codify the technology industry’s collective best practices for addressing suicide and self-harm content into a new Good Practices for Technology Companies guide and Thrive’s Director, along with partner representatives from Meta, Snap and Tik Tok presented at an international conference on the challenges and opportunities for technology at a leading international conference on suicide prevention.
“Snap Inc. is honored to be a founding member of Thrive. Since its inception, we have led and engaged in various parts of Thrive’s work, including governance, signal-sharing, and resource development. We are committed to working with industry peers and across sectors to thwart the spread of potentially harmful content and assist those in crisis. We look forward to continued meaningful impact from Thrive and its members in the years to come.” – Jacqueline Beauchere, Global Head of Platform Safety, Snap Inc.
“At Meta, we have strict rules against content that encourages, glorifies or shows suicide or self-harm, and remove it whenever we become aware of it. Unfortunately, this content isn’t limited to any one platform and it’s imperative that the technology industry works together to help prevent it from spreading. We’re proud to see the progress the Thrive program has made over the last year and will continue working closely with the Mental Health Coalition and our peers to help keep people safe across the many apps they use.” – Antigone Davis, VP, Global Head of Safety
The Annual Report looks ahead to Year Two, which will be focus on increased the amount of signals shared and actioned by the partners, promotion of Thrive publicly, finalizing the new Good Practices for the Technology Industry guidance, “Safety Saturdays” (a new collaborative effort to increase awareness of online safety for the public by the partners and other nonprofit agencies), as well as developing a global resource hub for new and evolving suicide and self-harm terms to help guide the companies with local information. Thrive continues to seek new partners to join to keep people safer online and prevent the spread of SSI content.
To read the Annual Report and learn more about Thrive please visit www.thrivesignals.org.
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About The Mental Health Coalition
The Mental Health Coalition (MHC), founded by designer and activist Kenneth Cole, is a nonprofit coalition of the nation’s leading organizations, brands, and individuals who have joined forces to end the stigma surrounding mental health. MHC is socializing, normalizing, and destigmatizing mental health while empowering access to vital resources for all. Learn more at thementalhealthcoalition.org.