Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube are teaming up to curb the spread of terrorist content online. The companies will create a shared industry database of ‘hashes’ for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images, that have been removed before. By sharing this data, potential terrorism related content can be identified and removed from their respective platforms. These companies will start the initiative by sharing the most extreme and egregious content - content that is most likely to violate all of companies’ content policies. Once a participating company marks certain content as objectionable and shares it, other companies can use these hashes to review the content and subsequently remove them from its own service if appropriate. Each company will continue to independently determine what content hashes should be shared, or removed from its own platform. The collaboration will look to involve other companies in the future as well. This is important, as having a shared public database will also help smaller websites automatically filter out unwanted content, which they otherwise might not have had resources to do so. Note that each participating company has its own definition of terrorist content, so the content removed and shared is bound to differ. Each company will also continue to apply its own transparency and review practices for any government requests. Interestingly in June, the European Commission, along with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft released a code of conduct which stated that along with criminal law sanctions, online hate speech needs to be…
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