Four tech giants team up to combat terrorist content from the web

Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter have announced the formation of a new partnership, the Global Internet Forum, to counter Terrorism. The partnership aims at contributing to technical and policy research and adds to the existing initiatives to completely wipe out terrorist recruitment material from the internet and promote counter-narratives to potential recruits. The tech giants will cooperate with each other along with governments, civil society groups, and other non-governmental organizations to share their technology and best practices to reduce internet accessibility to terrorists.

According to a blog post by Twitter, the companies will work together to build new technology that will help improve content detection and classification using machine learning, which will allow them to remove terrorism content from their platforms more rapidly. The companies also said that the new forum will build on initiatives such as the EU Internet forum and Shared Industry Hash Database, discussions with U.K. political leaders and other governments, and the findings of recent G7 and European Council meetings on the subject.

Twitter also mentioned, “The forum we have established allows us to learn from and contribute to one another’s counter speech efforts, and discuss how to further empower and train civil society organizations and individuals who may be engaged in similar work and support ongoing efforts such as the Civil society empowerment project (CSEP).” The Forum will host a series of workshops in Silicon Valley and around the world in partnership with U.N. CTED/ICT4Peace to further the anti-terror agenda.