Endeavor of Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have launched a partnership aimed at combating terrorists online by making hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists,

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have launched a partnership aimed at combating terrorists online by making hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists, The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism builds on several existing initiatives. The blog post announcing this partnership reads that that new forum builds on initiatives including the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database (shared database of digital fingerprints from “the most extreme and egregious” terrorist images and videos, so material that gets flagged and removed from one platform can be automatically taken down from others); discussions with the UK government; and the conclusions of the recent G7 and European Council meetings.  It will formalize 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 forum is supposed to make it easier for its members to cooperate with each other, as well as with governments, smaller companies, and non-governmental organizations.

The forum’s scope is supposed to evolve over time, but its core goals include improving technology for detecting terrorist material, creating best practices for addressing “extremism and online hate,” and knowledge sharing. It will also partner with the UN CTED/ICT4Peace in Silicon Valley and around the world to host a series of workshops.

The statement says that more information about the project will be shared “in due course.”