Facebook, Twitter, YouTube And Microsoft Team Up To Fight Terrorism
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) -- A handful of technology companies are teaming up to identify and remove videos and images believed to be terrorist content posted to online platforms, but how they define "terrorist content" remains to be seen.
In recent years, terrorist organizations -- most notably ISIS/ISIL -- have posted countless messages, images and videos to various social media platforms and websites.
On Monday, U.S. tech companies -- Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube (owned by Google) -- announced their plans to counter this violent imagery.
They announced their plans to create a shared database of unique digital fingerprints, or "hashes," for imagery and videos promoting violent terrorist messages and recruitment materials. Each company committed to sharing information about the images removed from their services with the other companies, via the database.
In a joint statement released Monday, the tech companies explain why they have decided to work together, stating:
"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."
But it remains to be seen how the companies will decide what content will be added to the database, other than as they state, "content most likely to violate all of our respective companies' content policies."
The companies will have to determine whether the content falls under terrorist content or free speech.
According to the joint release, "Each company 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."
The four tech companies maintain that they will not be sharing "personally identifiable information" and that matching content will not be automatically removed their sites. Other companies may also use the database in the future.
Each company will retain its own process to handle their users' grievances or appeals to removals.
By Hannah Albarazi - Follow her on Twitter: @hannahalbarazi.