WASHINGTON: Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Microsoft and all other major tech companies are ready to team up and curb the spread of online “terrorist content”.
The major U.S. tech giants made the announcement on Monday, responding to pressure from governments around the world.
The announcement aims to use “digital fingerprints” to block or remove violent content or efforts to recruit social media users for attack cells.
“There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies,” said a joint statement issued by the firms.
“The companies would share data that would help identify potential terrorist content on the respective hosted consumer platforms,” it added.
However, the statement did not indicate what type of technology would be used in the new initiative, except to say it would be based on a shared industry database of “hashes” or digital fingerprints that identify violent content.
“Each company will independently determine what image and video hashes to contribute to the shared database,” the statement said.
“No personally identifiable information will be shared, and matching content will not be automatically removed. Each company will continue to apply its own policies and definitions of terrorist content when deciding whether to remove content when a match to a shared hash is found.”
Governments in the United States, France and elsewhere have been pressing online firms to do more to curb extremist content, especially videos that depict beheadings and other gruesome acts often used in recruitment efforts.
