Social Media Giants Step Up Joint Fight Against Extremist Content

Social media giants said on Monday they were forming a global working group to combine their efforts to remove terrorist content from their platforms.

Responding to pressure from governments in Europe and the United States after a spate of terrorist attacks, the companies said they will share technical solutions for removing terrorist content, commission research to inform their counter-speech efforts and work more with counterterrorism experts.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism “will formalize and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN,” the companies said in a statement.

The move comes on the heels of last week’s call from European heads of state for tech firms to establish an industry forum and develop new technology and tools to improve the automatic detection and removal of terrorist content.

The political pressure on the companies has raised the prospect of new legislation at EU level, but so far only Germany has proposed a law fining social media networks up to 50 million euros ($56 million) if they fail to remove hateful postings quickly. The lower house of the German parliament is expected to vote on the law this week.

The companies will seek to improve technical work such as a database created in December to share unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos of extremist content.

They will also exchange best practices on content detection techniques using machine learning as well as define “standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals.”

Google announced additional measures to identify and remove terrorist or violent extremist content on its video-sharing platform shortly thereafter.

The social media firms said they would work with smaller companies to help them tackle terrorist content and organizations such as the Center for Strategic and International Studies to work on ways to counter online terrorism and hate.

All four companies have initiatives to counter online hate speech and will use the forum to improve their efforts and train civil society organizations engaged in similar work.