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Global tech giants vow to fight terrorism online

Johannesburg - The biggest digital companies in the world are rallying together to curb the spread of terrorism and identify terrorist content online and on social networks.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have formed a partnership to create a database of “hashes” which they say consist of flagged content of violent terrorist imagery and terrorist recruitment videos.  

The companies will be removing the flagged content from their services, and sharing the information with each other.

READ: Anti-terror investigators grapple with Telegram app

“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,” they said in a joint statement. 

“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 statement went further to read. 

Participating companies will be able to add hashes of terrorist images or videos that are identified on platforms to the database. 

Each company is expected to 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. 

READ: Passengers not the biggest threat of terror attacks

They will also allow reviews by any government requests, as well as retain their own appeal process for removal decisions and grievances. 

“There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies,” they added. 

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