by Ailan Evans
The tech industry’s anti-terrorism alliance announced Monday it would begin tracking content from far-right organization in a shared counter-terrorism database used by major tech companies.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a non-profit organization founded by Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, will add manifestos, posts and links from far-right militias flagged by U.N. anti-terrorist group Tech Against Terrorism to a shared database, GIFCT told Reuters. The organization will also share content flagged by Five Eyes, a global partnership between intelligence agencies in the U.S. and other countries, Reuters reported.
The database, established in 2017 and shared exclusively by the tech giants, aggregates hashes, or digital signatures, of images, videos and URLs, allowing tech companies to easily remove logged content, according to the GIFCT website. The database was previously focused on content primarily from Islamic terror organizations, according to Reuters.
The database will include hashes of content from the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, designated terrorist organizations by Five Eyes member Canada but not by the U.N., over their involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, Reuters reported.
“Anyone looking at the terrorism or extremism landscape has to appreciate that there are other parts…that are demanding attention right now,” GIFCT executive director Nicholas Rasmussen told Reuters.
Kicking off the @GIFCT_official Annual Summit today including announcements around expansion of the Hash Sharing Database; expanding scope of terrorist & violent extremist hashed content. https://t.co/eQMXZAzy50
— Erin Saltman, PhD (@ErinSaltman) July 26, 2021
GIFCT’s decision to expand the database was an important step in moving away from definitions of terrorism that were biased towards Islamic extremism, the organization’s director of programming Erin Saltman said Monday in an interview with Protocol.
“Government definitions of terrorism in theory are agnostic to any one religion or ideology. It’s about the violence. It’s about the target and the motive,” Saltman said.
Other than hashes of content related to organizations designated as terrorists by the U.N. and Five Eyes, the database contains manifestos authored by perpetrators of individual terrorist attacks, a spokesperson for GIFCT told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The organization also expanded its membership, adding vacation rental company Airbnb and emailing service Mailchimp, according to Reuters.
GIFCT acknowledged concerns over censorship and centralized information curation, attempting to reassure critics.
“We want to really maintain that this is not a cartel,” Saltman told Protocol. “Everyone has their independent policies and practices, some have more human resources than others.”
“Over-achievement in this takes you in the direction of violating someone’s rights on the internet to engage in free expression,” Rasmussen told Reuters.
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BIG TECH or BIG BROTHER? Maybe, both.
Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube are the domestic terrorists. The Global Internet Forum? What a joke just like the corrupt UN. More like every member state must submit to globalism or we will send those Islamic Extremists that Obama is giving a break to so they can turn our country into Britain where Sharia has taken over. Obama did this very thing during his administration, erasing many from the extremist list so of course this is simply a continuation of that corruption. No one is fooled.
Exclusively by the Tech Giants huh? Great, can’t wait until we can sue them. Those poor poor tech giants and their anti-Semites. When the Jews are attacked in New York by the anti-Semites they are told to hush because it isn’t about them, it is about black lives. When Asian’s are attacked they are told to hush because it isn’t about them, it’s about black lives. blm and antifa are both a domestic terrorist arm of the Democrat Party.
They terrorized our country for over a year with the backing of the radicals. No one thinks Jan 6 was worse than the year of terror that continues at the behest of my former party of tolerance and none of us are fooled.
We saw all of those “unindicted co-conspirators” on the Jan 6th list that are FBI agents doing the same set up they did for Whitmer’s attempted kidnapping. Still waiting on all that Capitol video they can’t seem to release. Political Prisoners held by traitors to our country. They think we are stupid. They can’t even pull off a set up of everyday Americans without getting caught. Let me guess, they teach CRT instead of James Bond in our weaponized intelligence agencies.
One big government organized tech takeover of we citizens against our will by a bunch of globalist traitors. We really need to start suing harder.
We The People own the vote not The Cheaters and Their Woke!
Independent Suburban Female and Fed Up Taxpayer.