Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter & YouTube teamed up to shape up a ‘Global Working Group’ with an aim to remove ‘Terror Content’

In a joint effort to remove terrorist content from their different platforms, the media giants Facebook, Google's YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft made an announcement regarding making a global working group.

Reacting to the pressure from governments in Europe and the United States after an epidemic of militant attacks, the all above mentioned companies said they would split technical solutions for taking away terrorist content, commission research to notify their counter-speech efforts and work more with counter-terrorism experts.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism "will formalise 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 mentioned in a statement.

The recent move is said to be a result of last week's call from European heads of state asking the tech firms to set up an industry forum and build up new technology and tools to perk up the automatic discovery and exclusion of the radical content.

What lifted up the view of new legislation at EU level is the political force on the companies, but so far only Germany has planned a law fining social media networks up to EUR 50 million ($56 million) if they fall short to get rid of hateful postings swiftly. The lower house of the German parliament is predictable to vote on the law this week.

The companies will now looking out to perk up the technical work such as a database that has been created in December to divide up exclusive digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos of extremist content.

Well that’s not all; they will also swap up the best practices on content detection system with machine learning as well as describe "standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals."

Social networking giant Facebook in month start opened up its efforts to get rid of terrorism content in reply to criticism from politicians that tech giants are not paying sufficient efforts to end militant groups using their platforms for misinformation and recruiting.

The giant Google hence announced extra steps to recognize and remove terrorist or violent extremist content on its video-sharing platform YouTube very soon.

With a view to end up the violations related to the promotion of terrorism Twitter suspended 376,890 accounts in the second half of 2016 and will divide up additional updates on its efforts to combat violent extremism on its platform in its next Transparency Report.

The social media firms also said that they would work with few small companies to help them to embark upon extremist content and organisations such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies to work on ways to counter online extremism and hate.