Company to work with YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to tackle threat and improve practices
Toby Ingleton |
Microsoft is partaking in a new initiative aimed at countering terrorism at hosted consumer events.
Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism has been set up with the aim of making hosted consumer events hostile to terrorist acts and violent extremists.
Microsoft will be working with other industry giants, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, as part of the initiative.
The forum will help enable cooperation and collaboration between member companies, as well as civil society groups and governments. The forum builds on existing initiatives, including the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database, as well as recent G7 and European Council meetings.
Though the intention of the forum is to adapt to the changing nature of terrorist and extremist threat moving forward, some initial pillars have been established. These include technological solutions, with member companies working together to refine existing joint technical work, including the Shared Industry Hash Database.
Other elements include research and knowledge sharing, which will help spread information and best practices around counter-terrorism between organisations.
Forum members will also engage with smaller companies, and support one another’s ‘counterspeech’ efforts, such as YouTube’s Creators for Change, Facebook’s P2P and OCCI, Microsoft’s partnership with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue for counter-narratives on Bing, and Twitter’s non-government organisation training programme.