Who did not see this coming? If you say you did not then you need to take off your rose-colored glasses.
A counterterrorism organization put together by Big Tech, including Facebook and Microsoft, decided to expand the types of extremist content they plan to target.
They want “to crack down on material from white supremacists and far-right militias.”
From Reuters:
Until now, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s (GIFCT) database has focused on videos and images from terrorist groups on a United Nations list and so has largely consisted of content from Islamist extremist organizations such as Islamic State, al Qaeda and the Taliban.Over the next few months, the group will add attacker manifestos — often shared by sympathizers after white supremacist violence — and other publications and links flagged by U.N. initiative Tech Against Terrorism. It will use lists from intelligence-sharing group Five Eyes, adding URLs and PDFs from more groups, including the Proud Boys, the Three Percenters and neo-Nazis.The firms, which include Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, share “hashes,” unique numerical representations of original pieces of content that have been removed from their services. Other platforms use these to identify the same content on their own sites in order to review or remove it.While the project helps combat extremist content on mainstream platforms, groups can still post violent images and rhetoric on many other sites and parts of the internet.
Big Tech formed GIFCT in 2017 after terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels. The U.S. and European governments pushed the Big Tech companies to form some kind of database to police extremist behavior online.
“Anyone looking at the terrorism or extremism landscape has to appreciate that there are other parts…that are demanding attention right now,” explained Executive Director Nicholas Rasmussen.
Reddit, Snapchat, Instagram, and LinkedIn are some of the fourteen companies that can access GIFCT’s database.
The companies have access to “digital fingerprints of videos and images related to groups on the U.N. Security Council’s consolidated sanctions lists and a few specific live-streamed attacks.”
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