Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Microsoft in pact to fight terror content

Social media giants Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft said yesterday that they had created a joint forum for removing extremist content from their respective sites.

The companies, under  pressure after a series of terrorist attacks, said they would work together to improve and refine existing shared efforts for identifying and removing terrorist content, work with counter-terrorism experts and commission research to guide future decisions regarding removal of terrorist content.

"We believe that by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online," the companies said in a joint statement.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism aims to "formalise and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN," the companies said.

Social media sites have become popular with terrorist groups for sharing ideas and recruiting people to their cause. These sites have strict rules against hate content and remove such content and accounts when they discover them. However, the task of searching through the activity of hundreds of millions of users is daunting.

Forum members already have their own individual counter-terrorism operations. For instance, Microsoft redirects users of its Bing search engine who searched for terrorism keywords to "counterspeech" including videos of former extremists denouncing their activities.

The four companies also operate existing collaborations, including a programme for sharing "hashes," unique digital fingerprints linked to extremist videos or photos.

However, these efforts have not prevented caustic criticism from advocacy groups and governments, which blamed them for their inability to eradicate extremist-promoting content. The UK government and a number of big advertisers pulled their ads from YouTube earlier this year as these appeared alongside videos containing extremist, homophobic, or racist content.