Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube on Tuesday announced plans to create a shared database of unique digital information in order to keep terrorists from using their platforms to recruit new members.
In a statement, Facebook announced that the four companies would work together to find more efficient ways to suppress terrorism content online.
“We commit to the creation of a shared industry database of ‘hashes’ — unique digital ‘fingerprints’ — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that we have removed from our services,” Facebook stated. “By sharing this information with each other, we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on our respective hosted consumer platforms.”
The social networking sites have been criticized for not doing enough to keep terrorists abroad from using their platforms to radicalize new members. The Islamic State in particular has grown adept at using social networking to either bring new fighters to the Middle East or to inspire homegrown attacks from lone-wolf terrorists.
The new database would allow each company to add a digital fingerprint to any violent or extremist image or video that would be identifiable when posted on social networks. That would allow the other companies to notice when those images or videos are shared.
The companies can then review the images and videos against their individual sites’ policies and decide if they want to remove the images or not.
Twitter says it has suspended 360,000 accounts in a little more than a year for promoting terrorism and violent acts. It said Tuesday’s announcement is more proof of its seriousness in combating the spread of extremism on its site.
“Going forward, we will manually share image hashes on a periodic basis with our industry colleagues to impede the spread of terrorist content elsewhere on the internet,” Twitter stated. “There is no one-size-fits-all approach for dealing with this type material; every platform is different.”
“As such, we have adopted an innovative model, developing a hybrid technical and reporting toolkit that works for Twitter first,” the company said. “The result has been a movement of terrorist content off the platform.”
