Facebook and Other Tech Companies Seek to Curb Flow of Terrorist Content

For all the good that has come from the internet, the online world has also served as a powerful device for recruiting terrorists and spreading their propaganda. A coalition of top technology companies is now trying to change that.

Facebook, Google, Twitter and Microsoft announced that they have teamed up to fight the spread of terrorist content over the web by sharing technology and information to reduce the flow of terrorist propaganda across their services. The group plans to create a kind of shared digital database, “fingerprinting” all of the terrorist content that is flagged. By collectively tracking that information, the companies said they could make sure a video posted on Twitter, for instance, did not appear later on Facebook. Through the coalition, technology companies will use “hashes,” or what they describe as “unique digital fingerprints,” to identify terrorist imagery and videos uploaded to their services.