At last! Internet giants agree to clamp down on terrorist videos
INTERNET giants have agreed to set up a database to find and remove extremist content in the wake of the westminster terror attack.
Firms including Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Twitter caved into Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s demand to crack down on jihadist images.
They vowed to work together to create ‘digital fingerprints’ of pictures and footage to identify them so they can be pulled automatically when they are posted online.
The system works by giving each image a unique ‘hash’ – a number that makes it traceable without being viewed. The technique is already used to remove millions of vile child abuse photos and videos from the web.
The hash list enables websites to find depraved content on their services and remove, block or prevent images being uploaded in the first place.
Creating a hash of an image allows it to be ‘plucked’ from the internet, like finding a needle in a haystack, to thwart extremists trying to share it.
The initiative comes after Miss Rudd held a Home Office summit with tech giants yesterday to call for tougher measures to combat jihadist material.
A row over the role of social media and internet firms flared up after Khalid Masood murdered four and injured
Last Friday’s Daily Mail more than 50 in a rampage outside Parliament last week.
The next day the Mail told how terror handbooks encouraging jihadists to carry out a car and knife attack – as Masood did – were available on Google and Twitter.
There was also anger that encrypted messaging services such as whatsApp were giving terrorists ‘a place to hide’ by refusing to help security services decode communications.
Masood used the app three minutes before his attack.
It has said it is ‘co-operating with law enforcement’.
Last year, a Commons report said tech giants risked lives by letting fanatics radicalise the young and vulnerable with hatred, extremism and the glorification of murder online.
Miss Rudd took action after warning that she was ‘calling time on terrorists using social media as their platform’.
The technology firms are to set up a cross-industry forum to make their sites a ‘hostile space’ for extremists. They also promised to help smaller firms tackle terrorist material online and support counter-extremist organisations.
Miss Rudd said: ‘ I don’t think people who want to do us harm should be able to use the internet or social media to do so. I’d like to see the industry go further and faster in not only removing online terrorist content but stopping it going up in the first place.’
Raising concerns about socalled ‘end-to-end’ encryption, in which the content of messages can be read by only the sender and recipient but not by anyone who intercepts it, Miss Rudd said: ‘Government and industry need to work more closely on this issue so law enforcement and intelligence agencies can get access to data to keep us safe.’
Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft said they would be ‘a hostile space for those who seek to do harm’.
But Labour MP Yvette Cooper, chairman of the Commons home affairs select committee, said: ‘Social media and the internet... need to get their act together and stop the dangerous illegal poison spreading online.’