In a bid to combat terrorism, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. “We believe that by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online”, Facebook said in its blog post.
The group will formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN. The companies will work together on research such as the Shared Industry Hash Database; content detection and classification techniques using machine learning; and define standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals.
Moreover, the companies will work with counter-terrorism experts including governments, civil society groups, academics and other companies to engage in shared learning about terrorism. It is also establishing a broad knowledge-sharing network via a joint partnership with the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (UN CTED) and the ICT4Peace Initiative. Under the partnership, it will engage with smaller companies to help them develop the technology and processes necessary to tackle terrorist and extremist content online.
Each of the companies already have robust counter-speech initiatives in place and with the new forum, these companies will contribute to one another’s counter-speech efforts, and discuss how to further empower and train civil society organizations and individuals who may be engaged in similar work and support ongoing efforts such as the Civil society empowerment project (CSEP).