Facebook, Google and Twitter speak out against blanket ban on extremist content

On Friday (30/04), Facebook, Google and Twitter participated in a hearing of the Australian Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security to discuss the banning of extremist content from their platforms. The Big Tech giants are working together to combat the spread of violent content on their sites, but believe that creating a law to completely ban this type of content is not the best answer.

As Josh Machin, chief policy officer at the Facebook Australia, said: “We know that combating terrorism and extremism is an ongoing battle. And unless we can eliminate hate and intolerance from society completely, hate and intolerance will continue to exist online. This is a challenge shared by governments, industry experts, academia, civil society and the media.”

What Twitter's Director of Public Policy Says

Kathleen Reen, Twitter’s director of public policy, said at the hearing that a blanket ban on extremist content would be problematic. “If you ban all discussion about this … you could find yourself pushing that discussion off platforms where companies are working to address the issue and pushing it onto other platforms.”

Reen added that to deradicalize groups and build inclusive and diverse communities, “we need to make sure that there is awareness, discussion, questioning and debate, and research into what the problem actually is.” She said, “Stopping the conversation completely is not going to address the problem as we see it. In fact, it will only make it worse.”

Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft formed a group to prevent the spread of extremist content in 2017, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which already has 13 companies.

GIFCT now wants to expand its reach to smaller, lesser-known platforms, as well as government and civil society institutions, to do “deep work” to address extremist content. The idea is to create “cohesive communities while also trying to stop these bad actors from doing their thing,” Reen said.

Through which channels you reach those people, classic and out of the box. ZDNet

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