The second Transparency Report of the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP) outlined the progress of the world’s largest alert platform for verified terrorist content, collected in real time. The Platform notifies technology companies of the presence of such content on their platforms.
This Transparency Report details the extent and scale of terrorist content discovered by Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform and how the data gathered is utilised to disrupt and understand terrorist and violent exploitation of the internet.
Between 1 December 2021 and 30 November 2022:
- Our open-source intelligence experts submitted 18,995 URLs containing terrorist content, and the TCAP sent 10,174 alerts to 57 tech companies, 82% of which are now offline. In total, 150 tech companies are registered and able to receive alerts as soon as we detect terrorist content on their platforms. We have increased the number of platforms we can alert from 114 in Year 1.
- Most of the content we have alerted has been related to Islamist terrorist entities (92% of alerts in Year 2). This is compared to 98% of alerts containing Islamist terrorist content in Year 1 of the TCAP.
- Because of alerts from the TCAP, an average of 84% of Islamist terrorist content was removed, whilst an average 61% of far-right terrorist content was removed. Compared to our previous Transparency Report, the takedown rate for Islamist terrorist content has decreased from 94% but has increased from 50% for far-right terrorist content.
- 18,048 URLs containing Islamist terrorist content were submitted to the TCAP, compared to 947 URLs containing far-right terrorist content. 9,436 alerts containing Islamist terrorist content were sent, whilst 738 alerts containing far-right terrorist content have been sent to tech companies. The discrepancy in numbers is due to the different propaganda dissemination techniques employed by far-right and Islamist terrorist groups. However, we have begun to close the gap between Islamist and far-right terrorist content submissions and alerts and this difference is smaller than in Year 1.
The second Transparency Report also outlines the key policies and collection practices developed by Tech Against Terrorism to enhance the effectiveness of the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform. Of particular note is the expansion of our Inclusion Policy to cover more entities whose official content we alert to tech companies.
The platform is developed using a transparency-by-design approach. This means that all the development work of the TCAP since its creation has ensured that we can be transparent about our actions and policies. In the online world, transparency is a vital pillar of trust between online service providers and their users.
