The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT); released in 2017 by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube; is expanding its initiative to report far-right and white supremacist terrorist content. The news came in an interview from Reuters with GIFCT Executive Director Nicholas Rasmussen.
GIFCT has a database of terrorist content that member companies can use to review and remove problematic posts. This database contains identifiers for images and videos, and will now include three additional categories of content. As a spokesperson for the counterterrorism initiative told The Verge, the new categories are PDFs from terrorists or violent extremists, terrorist publications that use specific images and logos, and problematic URLs frequently shared on social media.
Initiative focused on Islamic extremism, but now includes far-right groups
The GIFCT database originally focused on content from extremist Islamic groups such as the Taliban and ISIS. But now, the initiative will also include terrorist material from neo-Nazi and far-right groups such as the Three Percenters and the Proud Boys, the latter of which has been designated terrorist entity in Canada in May. This new material was collected by the UN's Tech Against Terrorism initiative and the Five Eyes international intelligence partnership.
According to GIFCT’s director of programming, Erin Saltman, content from less organized groups, such as the Boogaloo and QAnon movements, are not included in the expansion, even though they were involved in the attack on the US Capitol in January. “There is a lot of concern about censorship “It’s overkill, especially when it’s so closely tied to politics,” Saltman said. As Rasmussen told Reuters: “To overdo it is to violate a person’s right to engage in free speech on the internet.”
The GIFCT initiative is used for terrorist content moderation by Reddit, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Dropbox.
Image: Webphotographer/iStock
