Microsoft and other tech giants unite to fight terrorism under Global Internet Forum banner

Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube today announced the new Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. The tech giants are teaming up to help fight terrorism online through improved technological solutions, research, and knowledge-sharing.

Twitter announced in a blog post that the companies will work together to build new technology that will help improve content detection and classification using machine learning, which will allow them to remove terrorism content from their platforms more rapidly. The improved solutions will also enable these tech giants to improve their reporting methods for terrorist content.

“Our companies will work together to refine and improve existing joint technical work, such as the Shared Industry Hash Database; exchange best practices as we develop and implement new content detection and classification techniques using machine learning; and define standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals.”

A major part of the new Global Internet Forum, however, is the knowledge-sharing. Microsoft and others are building a new knowledge-sharing network under the Global Internet Forum, which will allow them to develop improved best practices. The new knowledge-sharing network will also allow the companies to evolve their counterspeech efforts. Twitter explains:

“Each of us already has robust counterspeech initiatives in place (e.g., YouTube’s Creators for Change, Jigsaw’s Redirect method, Facebook’s P2P and OCCI, Microsoft’s partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue for counter-narratives on Bing, Twitter’s global NGO training programme). The forum we have established allows us to learn from and contribute to one another’s counterspeech efforts, and discuss how to further empower and train civil society organisations and individuals who may be engaged in similar work and support ongoing efforts such as the Civil society empowerment project (CSEP).”

Fighting terrorism online has been a priority for Facebook and Twitter for a while now, but it’s also imperative for Microsoft and YouTube who own huge online communities.