The world’s largest technology companies will be told to remove extremist content in as little as one hour as British Prime Minister Theresa May attempts to greatly reduce the threat of it motivating additional attacks, The Independent reported.
May will also challenge them to create technology to prevent “evil material” from appearing on the internet and force them to publicly defend their efforts for the first time, the report said.
Social media companies suffered increased backlash for failing to prevent the spread of terrorist propaganda causing people to carry out terror attacks, the report said.
May, along with French and Italian leaders, will utilize a United Nations forum to claim progress while also increasing pressure on the tech companies to do more, the report said.
If they fail to make progress by a G7 meeting scheduled next month, the British government will consider imposing fines — a move already taken by Germany which passed legislation in June, the report said.
Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Twitter are among the tech companies who will face their rivals in New York after agreeing to set up a Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, the report said.
The goal of the plan is for terrorist propaganda to be removed within one to two hours — the significant period where most of the content is disseminated, the report said.
It currently takes an average of 36 hours for this content to be removed so one to two hours is a dramatic reduction, the report said.
In addition, the companies are being urged to “develop new technological solutions to prevent such content being uploaded in the first place.”
“These companies have been doing something, but just not enough,” a Drowning Street official told The Independent. “They have some of the best brains in the world. They should really be focusing that on what matters, which is stopping the spread of terrorism and violence. We want them to break the echo chambers.”
May is determined to act after being notified 68 percent of extremist content posted online is widely being shared within two hours, the report said. Nearly 27,000 web links were detected in just five months from the group Daesh who disseminates information on how to create explosives.
May will announce during the event terrorists are adapting to operations to thwart them online so tech companies must do the same.
“Terrorist groups are aware that links to their propaganda are being removed more quickly, and are placing a greater emphasis on disseminating content at speed in order to stay ahead,” she will say. “We need a fundamental shift in the scale and nature of our response – both from industry and governments – if we are to match the evolving nature of terrorists’ use of the internet. I call on others to join the UK, France, and Italy in pledging their support for this approach. This is a global problem that transcends national interests.”
Google and YouTube said they are improving their use of technology to help automatically recognize hate videos, the report said. Twitter removed 300,000 accounts in the first six months of 2017 with three quarters of them removed before their first tweet.
In addition, Facebook pledged to investigate the development of artificial intelligence in order to automatically identify extremist material, The Independent reported.
— WN.com, Jubilee Baez
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