Some of the Web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.
The move is a major step forward for Internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world, as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the US.
YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for “hashes,” a type of unique digital fingerprint that Internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
Such a system would catch attempts to repost content already identified as unacceptable, but would not automatically block videos that have not been seen before.
The companies would not confirm that they are using the method or talk about how it might be employed, but numerous people familiar with the technology said that posted videos could be checked against a database of banned content to identify new postings of, say, a beheading or a lecture inciting violence.
Use of the new technology is likely to be refined over time as Internet companies continue to discuss the issue internally.
In late April, amid pressure from US President Barack Obama and other US and European leaders concerned about online radicalization, Internet companies including Alphabet Inc’s YouTube, Twitter Inc, Facebook Inc and CloudFlare held a call to discuss options, including a content-blocking system put forward by the private Counter Extremism Project, according to one person on the call and three who were briefed on what was discussed.
The two people familiar with the still-evolving industry practice confirmed it to reporters after the Counter Extremism Project publicly described its content-blocking system for the first time last week and urged the big Internet companies to adopt it.
The call in April was led by Facebook’s head of global policy management Monika Bickert, sources with knowledge of the call said.
On it, Facebook presented options for discussion, according to one participant, including the one proposed by the non-profit Counter Extremism Project.
Other alternatives raised on the call included establishing a new industry-controlled nonprofit or expanding an existing industry-controlled nonprofit.
The model for an industry-funded organization might be the nonprofit National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which identifies known child pornography images using a system known as PhotoDNA.
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