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Social Media Companies Team up to Take on Unauthorised Content
The initiative will enable companies to quickly identify images and videos promoting terrorism that appear on their platforms.
A number of social media companies have come together, through an information sharing initiative, to identify and remove extremist content on their platforms.
The initiative will see Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft create a shared database of unique digital fingerprints – known as “hashes” – for material on their platforms that promote terrorism and breach their terms of use, including recruitment videos or violent terrorist imagery and memes. This will mean that when one company removes such content, others will be able to use the hash to identify and remove the same content from their platform.
Antony Walker, deputy CEO of techUK, yesterday commented:
“The announcement today that Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are creating a shared industry database of removed imagery will provide an improved mechanism to ensure terms of use are adhered to and that unauthorised content is removed quickly and effectively. By working collaboratively these organisations are ensuring a zero tolerance approach to the misuse of their platform."
“They are doing this in an open and transparent way with clear mechanisms in place for appeal and redress. This is a clear example of how the technology industry continues to innovate and collaborate for good, in partnership with policy-makers, the police and security agencies, and wider civil society bodies.”
