Four Tech Giants Working Hard To End Terrorism Flagged Online

Facebook, Twitter, Google's Youtube and Microsoft are working together to end terrorism. The technology giants announced that they are banding together to build a new database which sort and identifies terrorism content. This database will analyze photos and videos that are use to recruit people into terrorism.

The four biggest social companies signed a voluntary pledge in Europe and will be starting to remove terror content online. This collaboration will result to slowly stop terrorist motivation content posted on social medias. Images and videos posted contain digital fingerprints that would allow tech firms to identify potential violent content linked to terrorist organizations. These digital fingerprints called hashes.

Propaganda and recruitment are often shared online by supporters of the Islamic Militant Group or also known as ISIS. This better idea comes a year after the same companies are working hand-in-hand to identify and remove child pornography using the digital fingerprints. This technique was developed by the UK's Internet Watch Foundation.

Possible terrorism contents are flagged and removed from the database and will be automatically reviewed by each company to determine whether it violates the companies' respective terms and agreement of service. After the voluntary pledge of removing platforms within 24 hours, it was less than 80 percent recorded cases. The results showed that 40 percent of the suspected cases were reviewed in less than 24 hours.

These tech giants were facing the challenge of balancing freedom of expression and respecting users' privacy. Their main goal is to identify and determine the contentious task of what constitutes terrorist content. Recently, the most extreme and horrendous terrorist videos and images were removed from their services. More companies are becoming involved in the database in the near future.

Twitter announced that it has suspended 235,000 accounts promoting terrorism in the last six months. The internet has a great impact controlling sites to combat the promotion of extremism, terrorism, and hatred.