In a joint statement on Twitter’s public policy blog, Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter announced they would form the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.
This collaboration is a move to push back against content from terrorists and other extremist groups and combats terrorism online. In a blog post released by Microsoft, the company said only by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of their individual efforts, will they have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online.
The group also expects to foster cooperation from everyone including small tech companies and supra national bodies like the European Union and the United Nations to counter the dissemination of extremist information on online platforms. The forum will formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration to develop new technology and tools to improve automatic detection and removal of extremist content.
In December 2016 all four companies had announced a similar collaboration that would allow them to share databases without each having to do the legwork independently. This was achieved by creating a shared industry hash database to share unique digital fingerprints that are automatically assigned to videos or photos of extremist content.
The forum will also host workshops around the world in partnership with the U.N., to teach smaller companies and organizations to adopt their own proactive plans for combating terror. The sessions will also cover key strategies for executing counter speech programs like YouTube’s Creators for Change and Facebook’s Peer to Peer and Online Civil Courage Initiative.
The forum, according to Microsoft, will allow them to learn from and contribute to one another’s counter speech efforts, discuss how to further empower and train civil society organizations and support ongoing efforts such as the Civil Society Empowerment Project (CSEP.)
This call for better Internet regulation comes after all four companies were heavily criticized for not doing enough against the rise of terrorist content on platforms created by them. Earlier Google announced technological measures to identify and remove terrorist propaganda or inflammatory religious content from its video sharing platform YouTube. Similarly, Twitter also suspended 376,890 accounts in 2016 for violating rules relating to the promotion of terrorism.
All four companies agree the scope of the forum will increase over time and further information on all their initiatives will be revealed and shared in due course of time.
