Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have announced a coalition to combat terrorism. Together they aim to remove terrorist activities from their platforms by sharing resources with each other.
Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter have formed a team to combat terrorism. These platforms have formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which will aid in making their services “hostile to terrorists and violent extremists”.
The four platforms will now share data and resources for fighting terrorism and will develop new detection techniques for this purpose. This forum also aims to formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between their companies and nurture cooperation with smaller tech companies. This means that the four participating tech giants will also reach out to other smaller tech organizations for countering extremist content.
The forum members also believe that by working together they will have a greater impact on countering terrorism. In its blog post on the matter, Twitter said:
This forum builds on initiatives like the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database. The creation of this database follows initial efforts by Dartmouth College supported by Microsoft. In addition to that, Twitter stated that this will also foster cooperation between international bodies like the European Union and the United Nations and even civil society groups.
As far as the impact upon online terrorist content is concerned, it remains to be seen as to how effective the joint effort will be with respect to content published on the platforms controlled by members of the forum and the web in general.
Source: Twitter
