Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube have agreed to collaborate in order to limit the spread of terrorist propaganda on their various platforms.
The tech giants said they will launch a database that will be accessible to the companies. The database base will be used to identify images, videos and content that they deem extreme so that it can be taken down from their respective websites.
Facebook in a post to announce the partnership said: “We commit to the creation of a shared industry database of “hashes” — unique digital “fingerprints” — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that we have removed from our services. By sharing this information with each other, we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on our respective hosted consumer platforms. We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online.”
Furthermore, “Our companies will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services — content most likely to violate all of our respective companies’ content policies. Participating companies can add hashes of terrorist images or videos that are identified on one of our platforms to the database. Other participating companies can then use those hashes to identify such content on their services, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove matching content as appropriate.”
The hashes won’t be shared until early next year after the technical work has been completed. The post also stated that other firms that are interested in joining the initiative in the future are welcomed.
This initiative is a good development as terror cells are very active on social media which they effectively use to spread their propaganda, radicalize and recruit unsuspecting online users.
Although there are other teror groups using social media, Islamic State (ISIS) is no doubt the main target of this initiative. This is because Islamic State is one of the most vibrant terror groups on social media.
