This New Tool Tries to Prevent Internet Terrorism Content

 This New Tool Tries to Prevent Internet Terrorism Content

Terrorist groups who post their content online have leveraged small platforms that cannot process takedown requests. There's going to be a new, free tool for housecleaning.

In recent years, terrorist organizations have taken up residence on smaller, less well-known internet forums where they store, disseminate, and link to graphic films of beheadings and recruitment materials.

Due to a lack of funding and experience, those platforms have found it difficult to address the issue; nevertheless, a new tool being developed by a Google subsidiary in association with a terror-tracking NGO aims to address that issue.

Altitude is a free tool developed by Tech Against Terrorism, an organization that aims to disrupt terrorists' online activity, and Jigsaw, a division of Google that monitors violent extremism, disinformation, and oppressive restrictions. It was launched in Paris on Friday. The tool's goal is to enable smaller platforms to quickly and effectively identify and eliminate terrorist information from their networks.

Additionally, the project collaborates with the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, an industry-led organization that was established in 2017 by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter and that maintains a shared database of picture hashes, or digital fingerprints, of terrorist-related information.

With the notable exception of Telegram, major tech companies like Facebook, Google, and X (formerly Twitter) have mostly eliminated terrorist content from their networks with the assistance of committed NGOs and law enforcement, following years of errors and neglecting to address the issue. Terrorists have therefore shifted to less regulated and under-resourced platforms, where their presence either remains undetected or is unmanageable due to the companies' inability to handle the influx of removal requests.

"Just because the Islamic State and other terrorist organizations lost access to their social media platforms, doesn't mean they gave up on the internet. Jigsaw CEO Yasmin Green tells WIRED, "They went elsewhere." They discovered this chance to host content on other websites, small and medium-sized platforms, or file-hosting services. Although terrorist content was not welcome on those platforms, it was nonetheless hosted there—and quite a bit of it.

Even if there are various products available that function similarly to Altitude, many smaller businesses cannot afford them. Professionals such as Green think that such tools should be freely available and open source.

The new tool is easily includeinto the backend of any platform it is used with. Subsequently, it establishes a connection with the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform of Tech Against Terrorism, which serves to consolidate the gathering of content produced by officially recognized terrorist groups. All of the Altitude-using platforms may quickly and simply verify whether a piece of content has been confirmed to be terrorist content thanks to the database.

In addition, Altitude will include background information on the terrorist organizations that the content is linked to, more instances of similar content, details on how other platforms have handled the content, and eventually details on the pertinent legal framework in a certain nation or area.

Executive director of Tech Against Terrorism Adam Hadley tells WIRED, "We are not here to tell platforms what to do; rather, we are here to furnish them with all the information that they need to make the moderation decision." "We aim to raise the standard of response. The most important thing is to make sure that the worst content is eliminated in a way that upholds the law, not how much of it is deleted.

More than 100 platforms are involved with Tech Against Terrorism; nearly all of them don't want to be identified because of the harm that being associated with terrorist content would do to their businesses. Tech Against Terrorism collaborates with businesses that offer paste bins, messaging apps, social media networks, video-sharing platforms, and forums.