Brooke Istook is an online child safety expert and digital safety executive with more than a decade of experience at the intersection of technology, platform design, and child protection.
As President of Heat Initiative, she leads research, legal strategy, and corporate accountability campaigns aimed at compelling major technology companies to strengthen protections for children. Before that, she spent nine years as Vice President at Thorn, where she built the tools, research infrastructure, and education programs that now operate at scale - including Spotlight, used by 12,000+ law enforcement investigators across the U.S. and Canada and supporting the identification of more than 22,000 child victims of trafficking.
She has testified as an expert witness in the 2026 landmark social media mental health trial in Los Angeles, advised major technology platforms on child safety design, briefed government officials, and presented at Interpol and U.S. embassies across India. Her work sits at the intersection of platform accountability, safety by design, and the structural conditions that determine what children actually experience online.
She holds a Master's in International Development and a B.S. in Management Information Systems and lives in Fort Worth, Texas with her three boys.