Casablanca — Social media platforms Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have announced a partnership aimed at countering the spread of terrorist content online.
A joint-statement released on December 5 announced the companies’ commitment to resisting the circulation of online terrorist content by way of collaboration. It begins with a powerful declaration: “Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are coming together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online. There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services.”
Since their creation, social media companies have been wrestling between their desire to defend free speech and their duty to condemn hateful and violent content. But the rise of terrorist content online over the last few years has pressured social media companies to take a firmer stance.
“Starting today, 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,” the companies said in the statement, adding that “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.”
“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,” the statement continued.
Though partner companies are committed to sharing valuable information, each will continue to “apply its own policies and definitions of terrorist content when deciding whether to remove content when a match to a shared hash is found.” In other words, each company will still maintain a certain level of autonomy in their content-removal decisions.
James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, thinks this announcement foreshadows even more action on behalf social networks.
“Terrorist content is only the start,” he said. “Now they have to figure what to do about hate speech, racism and bullying.”
“They can’t evade responsibility anymore,” Lewis added.
