Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, YouTube up the ante on curbing terrorist propaganda
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, comprised of Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube, has made a "multimillion-dollar" commitment it said will support research on terrorist abuse of the internet.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Google's SVP and general counsel Kent Walker said the new commitment focuses on conducting and sharing research about how terrorists use the internet to influence their audiences so the forum can stay one step ahead.
In a bid to better tackle terrorist content on the companies' respective platforms, Walker told the United Nations in New York on Wednesday that the forum, which formed earlier this year, has now set a goal of working with 50 smaller tech companies to help them curb online terrorist propaganda.
"On Monday, we hosted dozens of companies for a workshop with our partners under the UN Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate," he said. "There will be a workshop in Brussels in December and another in Indonesia in the coming months. And we are also working to expand the hash-sharing database to smaller companies."
The forum also hopes to determine how governments, tech companies, and civil society can fight back against online radicalisation. Walker revealed that the third and final pillar of the consortium's plan is to work together to find "powerful messages and avenues to reach out to those at greatest risk of radicalisation".
The group of companies announced they would be joining forces last year at the EU Internet Forum to curb terrorist content, specifically promising at the time to build a shared database of unique digital fingerprints -- or hashes -- for violent terrorist imagery, or terrorist recruitment videos and images, which have been removed from their services.
On Wednesday, Walker said the companies are putting their best talent and technology against the task of removing terrorist content and are "doing a better job of sharing breakthroughs with each other", pointing to the forum's hash-sharing database as being an early success.
"We have to deal with these problems at tremendous scale. The haystacks are unimaginably large and the needles are both very small and constantly changing," he explained.
"In recent months we have more than doubled the number of videos we've removed for violent extremism and have located these videos twice as fast."
Between August 2015 and June 2017, Twitter suspended more than 935,000 accounts for the promotion of terrorism. According to a company blog post, during the first half of 2017, over 95 percent of the accounts it removed were detected using its in-house technology.
Facebook, Walker said, is also leveraging artificial intelligence to root out "terrorist clusters" by mapping out pages, posts, and profiles with terrorist material before shutting them down.
"There is no magic computer program that will eliminate online terrorist content, but we are committed to working with everyone in this room [during his UN address] as we continue to ramp up our own efforts to stop terrorists' abuse of our services," Walker added.
Also addressing the UN in New York on Wednesday was Australia's Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, who said Australia is keen to work with communications companies to crack encrypted messages used by terrorists, and congratulated Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Google, and YouTube for joining with governments to combat terrorists online.
While Australia supports an open, free, and secure internet, Bishop said encrypted messaging apps used by extremist groups are in the Australian government's sights.
"Australia is very keen to work constructively with communications service providers to prevent terrorists from using encryption to hide online," said Bishop, who was expected to hold a bilateral meeting with Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates following the UN proceedings.
"This is a significant challenge as encryption is vital for the protection of many legitimate activities including national security ecommerce and personal privacy."
PREVIOUS AND RELATED CONTENT
Google: Here's how we're going to crack down on terrorist propaganda
Google responds to criticism that it and other platforms aren't doing enough to prevent online indoctrination.
Facebook outlines its AI-driven efforts to fight terrorism
After facing criticism from EU leaders following the string of terrorist attacks in the UK, Facebook is stepping up its efforts to curb extremist content online.
The laws of Australia will trump the laws of mathematics: Turnbull
Despite calling the laws of mathematics "commendable", the prime minister of Australia told ZDNet the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia when it comes to legislating decryption.