
A meeting on counterterrorism
Four tech giants, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube join efforts to counter fight online terrorism. This comes as both a response to the increasing alarmingly terrorism widespread via online channels and as a measure facing criticism from NGOs and companies regarding ads that were put before extremist content on YouTube or disclosure of reviewers’ identity on Facebook.
Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube Join Efforts to Counter Fight Online Terrorism
With the widespread of terrorism and violent extremism regarded as a transnational, global concern, the four tech giants join efforts to fight against terrorism by developing shared policies, while also removing some practices in order to establish a baseline in order to fight against terrorist or extremist content on their consumer services. Their main goal is to share their technological and operational elements among them in order to have a much greater impact in wake of the online counterterrorism fight.
Furthermore, the forum in which these tech giants join efforts to fight against terrorism comes after the initiatives of the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database, as well as taking into account discussions with the U.K. and other governments in addition to the G7 and European Council meeting that recently took place.
The means of their joint efforts to fight against terrorism are based on several types of solutions. Firstly, technological solutions. These solutions work under the Shared Industry Hash Database and involve the implementation of content detection and classification techniques through the use of machine learning.
Research is another means of counter fight online terrorism by commissioning research for counter-speech training and guideline development. The share of knowledge is another means. This is a means of cooperative work with the U.N. Security Council Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (U.N. CTED) and with smaller companies in which the four tech giants will help the smaller companies to develop the technology and processes needed to counter fight terrorist and extremist content online.
One final means to counter fight online terrorism online is through counterspeech methods by working with NGOs such as Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Global Network Initiative by learning the know-how of rhetoric and discourse in order to assess whenever there is a situation of identifying and countering hate speech, discriminatory or radicalization speech online, on either of the 4 tech giants’ social or search channels (Bing, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook).
As their initiative will grow and gain traction, they will release more information about the processes.
Image Source: Flickr