Tech Against Terrorism is pleased to announce that the Government of Canada has awarded Tech Against Terrorism a grant to expand our work supporting smaller tech platforms in tackling terrorist use of their services. The C$1million grant will support the development of the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP), a centralised platform aimed at facilitating tech company moderation of terrorist content and improving quantitative analysis of terrorist use of the internet. The grant was announced by the Government of Canada on 26 June.
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The Terrorist Content Analytics Platform
The TCAP will support tech companies to expeditiously address terrorist use of their platforms through an alert function. To help inform and manage company moderation procedures, companies will also be able to securely examine verified terrorist content on the TCAP.
To address the increasing fragmentation around datasets of terrorist content, the TCAP will constitute the first free unified platform for online terrorist material. By allowing vetted academics and expert researchers access to the platform, this centralised dataset will be able to instigate better quantitative analysis of terrorist use of the internet and inform the development of accurate counter-measures.
The TCAP will also provide a foundation for the development of third-party automated solutions to counter terrorist use of the internet by making training data available for developers and expert researchers designing solutions based on machine-learning, such as image and audio classifiers.
We will be starting a consultation period shortly in order to improve our understanding of feedback from relevant stakeholders in the tech sector, academia, and civil society.
Background to Tech Against Terrorism
Tech Against Terrorism is an initiative launched by the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UN CTED) in April 2017 and implemented by the UK-based NGO QuantSpark Foundation. We support the global technology sector in responding to terrorist use of the internet whilst respecting human rights, and we work to promote public-private partnerships to mitigate this threat. Our research shows that terrorist groups - both jihadist and far-right terrorists - consistently exploit smaller tech platforms when disseminating propaganda. At Tech Against Terrorism, our mission is to support smaller tech companies in tackling this threat whilst respecting human rights and to provide companies with practical tools to facilitate this process. As a public-private partnership, the initiative is supported by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the governments of Spain, Switzerland, the Republic of Korea, and Canada.
Our work with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism
Tech Against Terrorism works to help implement the GIFCT’s knowledge-sharing and capacity building activities. This year, Tech Against Terrorism and the GIFCT will co-organise four global workshops and seven e-learning sessions as part of our outreach programme. With the support of the GIFCT, Tech Against Terrorism most recently worked with academic blog Jihadology to implement a user registration system in order to prevent terrorist exploitation of the site. The TCAP will serve to complement the GIFCT’s hash-sharing consortium.
