New York, US (BBN) - For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda.
A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that, reports The New York Times.
Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced on Monday that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services.
The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged.
By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook.
“Throughout this collaboration, we are committed to protecting our users’ privacy and their ability to express themselves freely and safely on our platforms,” the companies said in a statement.
They added they were discussing other ways “to prevent the spread of terrorist content online while respecting human rights.”
The effort follows a year of intense scrutiny of technology companies and the role they play in unintentionally aiding the rise of recruitment efforts by groups like the Islamic State or in the spread of terrorist messages after mass shootings.
Facebook, Twitter and Google’s YouTube have repeatedly been criticised for engaging in what is essentially a game of whack-a-mole, as terrorist accounts are created just as fast as they are deleted from the services.
Some Silicon Valley companies have also been criticized for their hard-line stance on encryption of messaging products, a method of communication adopted by terrorist groups that is largely not susceptible to infiltration by law enforcement.
This year, Apple publicly challenged the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the agency asked it to open up an iPhone used by one of the attackers who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif., in 2015. Apple declined to do so.
Other technology companies, like Twitter, have pushed back against the assertion that they are doing little to stem the tide of terrorist content on their services.
In February, the social media company said it had suspended more than 125,000 accounts associated with online extremism since the middle of 2015. As of August, it said, it had shut down 360,000 such accounts.
Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.
So if a Twitter post with a terrorist image is identified, hashed and added to the database, Facebook can use that identifier to check to see if that content appears on its network. If it has, Facebook can remove that piece of content from its site if it chooses to do so.
Technology companies generally remove content that has been flagged as inappropriate or a violation of their terms of service.
Each company will ultimately have discretion over what content it removes from its own network. No personally identifiable information will be stored in the database. The group said it planned to be open to other companies joining the effort.
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