Tech Companies Use Hashes To Disrupt Illegal Activities In Social Media

We all know that in June 2017, many companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft formed the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Terrorists were exploited for their activities through the barriers created by these companies. In recent times, GIFCT hailed the achievements of its one-year operations but still, significant challenges still remain. All of these companies rely on artificial intelligence because it performs certain functions like image matching and video matching that helps in identifying terrorists whose information is present in the terrorist database. Hence, blocking out these figures becomes easy.

Reports say that every single minute around 510,000 comments and 136,000 photos are shared on Facebook. Not to mention, on Twitter 350,000 tweets and 300 hours of video is uploaded on YouTube. So, it is observed that even though these terrorists are blocked in one platform, they later move on to another one. To solve this problem GIFCT created a shared industry database of “hashes”. To track digital activity hashes act as a unique digital fingerprint. In the present time, around 88,000 hashes have been added in the database. These hashes are expected to reach 100,000 by the end of 2018 because other companies like Instagram, Justpaste.it and LinkedIn have joined GIFCT.

These methods have surely disrupted terrorists’ use of social media in the past and it might do the same in the future.