Social media giants partnering to help curb spread of online terrorist content

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are coming together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online, said Facebook in a press release on Monday.

"There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services," Facebook said. "When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies."

The program would create a shared industry database of unique digital "fingerprints," or "hashes," to help automatically identify terrorist videos or images the companies could then remove, the tech company said.

"We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online," it said.

Techniques have been developed to remove illegal online content. Organizations have been using a similar database of hashed images to keep child pornography off their services and to identify copyright-protected files, reported TechCrunch, an online publisher of technology industry news.

Essentially, a piece of content is given a unique identifier, TechCrunch said, adding that if any copies of that file are analyzed, they will also produce this same hash value.

However, the task to identify whether an image or video promotes terrorism can be more "subjective," depending on national laws and the rules of a particular company's service, the Associated Press said in a report.

Social media has been used by terrorist groups like the Islamic State as a platform to publish their propaganda, organizing terrorist attacks, as well as recruit and radicalize supporters. Thus, social media have been criticized by many as not doing enough to combat internet terrorism.

Under the new alignment, the four companies promised to share "hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services -- content most likely to violate all of our respective companies' content policies."

Participating companies can also add hashes of terrorist images or videos that are identified on one of their platforms to the database, Facebook said.

The companies can then use those digital fingerprints to identify such content on their services, review against their own policies and definitions, and remove matching content as appropriate, it added.

The four companies also stressed that no personally identifiable information will be shared, and matching content will not be automatically removed.

The four companies said they will be looking at involving additional companies in the future.

"We also seek to engage with the wider community of interested stakeholders in a transparent, thoughtful and responsible way as we further our shared objective to prevent the spread of terrorist content online while respecting human rights," Facebook said. Endi