In a recent news post made by Facebook today, the company has announced a strategic partnership with other 3 Internet and computing giants: Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube for the purpose of fighting online terrorist content.
“There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services.“
Says the company and further elaborates that upon being alerted to such content, they shall take swift action against it, in accordance to respective policies.
The Weapons of War
In order to fight terrorist content the companies committed to create and share an industry database of “hashes” – unique digital “fingerprints” – containing violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that they remove from their services.
Each company will independently determine what image and video hashes to contribute to the shared database and also, each will apply its own policies and definitions of terrorist content when deciding whether to remove content when a match to a shared hash is found.
Through sharing the information with each other, the companies hope to achieve greater efficiency that will eventually lead to curbing online terrorism as much as possible.
The shared database will not be secluded to the aforementioned companies however, as the plan is to involve additional companies in the future.
To calm down users who might have rising concerns regarding privacy due to the growing restrictions caused by the move, Facebook also mentions that there will be no personally identifiable information shared, and matching content will not be automatically removed.
