Facebook says it is collaborating with Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube to help curb the spread of terrorist content on the Internet.
The social media says it is creating a shared industry database of “hashes”, which will contain unique digital “fingerprints” of violent terrorist imagery and will be shared among the collaborating social networks to identify and remove from their services.
Facebook says that already, it has removed violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images from its services, because “there is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services.”
According to the social network, “by sharing this information with each other, we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on our respective hosted consumer platforms. We hope this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online.”
The company says it will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos it has removed from its services, and that “other participating companies can then use those hashes to identify such content on their services, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove matching content as appropriate.”
Each company will independently determine what image and video hashes to contribute to the shared database and personal information will not be shared on the database, Facebook says.
“No personally identifiable information will be shared, and matching content will not be automatically removed. Each company will continue to apply its own policies and definitions of terrorist content when deciding whether to remove content when a match to a shared hash is found.
“And each company will continue to apply its practice of transparency and review for any government requests, as well as retain its own appeal process for removal decisions and grievances. As part of this collaboration, we will all focus on how to involve additional companies in the future,” the company says.