A host of Internet tech giants have teamed up to form a grand alliance known as Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism with the aim to help make their hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.
The spread of terrorism and violent extremism has become a pressing global problem and a critical challenge for all.
“We take these issues very seriously, and each of our companies have developed policies and removal practices that enable us to take a hard line against terrorist or violent extremist content on our hosted consumer services.
“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,” a statement released by the forum of the tech giants read.
The new forum builds on initiatives including the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database; discussions with the UK and other governments; and the conclusions of the recent G7 and European Council meetings.
The forum said the scope of its work will evolve over time as there would be need for it to be responsive to the ever-evolving terrorist and extremist tactics.
It said, initially, the scope would include technological solutions that will involve the tech firms working together to refine and improve existing joint technical work such as the Shared Industry Hash Database; exchange best practices as well as develop and implement new content detection and classification techniques using machine learning; and define standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals.
Also, the grand alliance said it will adopt knowledge-sharing in its modus operandi by working with counter-terrorism experts including governments, civil society groups, academics and other companies to engage in shared learning about terrorism, and through a joint partnership with the UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (UN CTED) and the ICT4Peace Initiative, it will establish a broad knowledge-sharing network to engage with smaller companies, develop best practices and counter-speech.