Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Youtube have announced the formation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a new collaboration to disrupt terrorist and violent extremist use of their platforms. This new forum builds on past initiatives including the EU Internet Forum, and the Shared Industry Hash Database. The forum will serve to structure existing and future areas of collaboration, between the GIFCT forum and smaller tech companies, civil society, academics, and governments.
In a press release, the companies stated: “the spread of terrorism and violent extremism is a pressing global problem and a critical challenge for us all. We take these issues very seriously, and each of our companies have developed policies and removal practices that enable us to take a hard line against terrorist or violent extremist content on our hosted consumer services. We believe that by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online”.
The GIFCT will initially focus on providing technology solutions, to encourage the companies to work together to exchange best practices, and to define a standardised transparency reporting method for content removal. The forum will also commission research to both inform current counter-speech efforts, and to guide future technical and policy issues around the removal of content. Further, in joint partnership with UN CTED/ICT4Peace for our Tech Against Terrorism project, the forum will work with counter-terrorism experts in knowledge-sharing. We will assist in creating a broad knowledge-sharing network, to engage with smaller companies, and to develop best practices.
For the GIFCT, Tech Against Terrorism will be hosting a series of learning workshops, beginning with its launch in San Francisco, and then at locations around the world, to further collaboration between technology companies, government, academia, and NGOs.
In partnership with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Facebook, Tech Against Terrorism will be hosting the launch of GIFCT in San Francisco in August, and further collaboration will follow between technology companies, government, academia, and NGOs.