Social media giants unite

‘Today, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are announcing the formation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, which will help us continue to make our hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and violent extremists,’ trumpeted Twitter on its blog on Monday.
Recently, governments in the United States and Europe have been applying pressure to the platforms to remove or reduce extremist content. Following the terror attacks in Europe several weeks ago, British Prime Minister Theresa May spoke out against social media platforms, saying: “We cannot allow this ideology the safe space it needs to breed. Yet, that is precisely what the Internet and the big companies that provide Internet-based services provide.”
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism ‘will formalise and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster co-operation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN,’ the companies said in a statement.
In an incredible twist of fate, the once tough competitors of the social media world have joined together to create a social alliance to benefit the entire world. Whether it was the political pressure or fear of large potential fines – up to 50 million euros in Germany, if the platforms failed to remove hateful postings quickly – the companies have created a worldwide solution to combating online terror.
It’s truly fascinating to consider the vast amounts of brilliant minds that are creating complicated algorithms to identify extremist content on the platforms. Each platform receives such an enormous amount of new content every minute that reviewing it all would be impossible by a human alone. To think that each platform is allocating potentially genius level brainpower to combat extremism online is encouraging. Recently, Facebook announced that ‘it now has more than 150 employees dedicated to fighting terrorism, alongside automated efforts to detect extremist content.’
If the other platforms have devoted a similar amount of staff to this global counter-terrorism taskforce, we may actually see a significant decrease in extremism content online. In December, the companies created a database to share unique digital fingerprints they automatically assign to videos or photos of extremist content and now, just six months later, they have all joined forces again.
The creators of extremist content will surely continue with haste and zeal to spread their hate, but I hope that the platforms can stay ahead of the curve. For now; however, the efforts made by the platforms is a solid start.