Everyone agrees that terrorism is a threat that needs to nipped at the bud, the more its curtailed the less it can spread. Social media is used rampantly by these bad actors as a mean to recruit, propagate and communicate both covertly and overtly. Due to privacy laws and operators of popular social sites safeguarding user profiles, often detected terrorist attacks that could have been prevented or culprits apprehended becomes unfruitful.

In an effort to monitor these activities and hopefully thwart global attacks, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are announcing the formation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which will help to make their hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists.

While each of the companies have developed policies and removal practices that enables to take a hard line against terrorist or violent extremist content, by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online.

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. Technologies on research, counter speech, will now be shared among relevant agencies to refine and improve existing joint technical work. This will also include the implementation of  new content detection and classification techniques using machine learning; and define standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals.

Social media company’s like Facebook and Twitter have been constantly under fire for lack of monitoring on activities that goes on the sites, with owners of these platforms not taking responsibility for the content that’s being shared.

(image courtesy: The Imaginative Conservative.org)