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No Fear No Favour

Google, Facebook Joins Hands To Fight Against Terrorism

The increase terrorism attack in the recent months has drawn much of the attention by the entire world and the need to take appropriate steps is still remain a challenging task. While politics and the diplomacy forced the political leaders to take any concrete steps, the internet giants like the Facebook, Google and the YouTube has united to give back the terrorism.

In a fight against the terrorism, Google has introduced new measures to tackle the spread of terrorist material online, saying that threat has a serious challenge and that more immediate action should be taken.

Google has pledged for the better detection of extremist content and faster review, more experts, tougher standards and an expansion of counter-radicalisation work.

Kent Walker, a senior vice-president and general counsel at Google, said in a blogpost: “Terrorism is an attack on open societies, and addressing the threat posed by violence and hate is a critical challenge for us all.

“Google and YouTube are committed to being part of the solution. We are working with government, law enforcement and civil society groups to tackle the problem of violent extremism online. There should be no place for terrorist content on our services.

“While we and others have worked for years to identify and remove content that violates our policies, the uncomfortable truth is that we, as an industry, must acknowledge that more needs to be done.”

Google had developed a technology which will prevent re-uploads of known terrorist content, using image-matching techniques.

Again, to counter terrorism activity, Google is planning to increase the number of independent expers in YouTube’s Trusted Flagger programme, and will expand its work against counter-extremism groups to identify content that may be being used to radicalise.

It will take a tougher stance on videos that contain inflammatory religious or supremacist content.

Walker said: “Collectively, these changes will make a difference. And we’ll keep working on the problem until we get the balance right. We are committed to playing our part.”

Labour’s Yvette Cooper, chair of the Commons home affairs select committee, welcomed the pledges. “This is a very welcome step forward from Google after the [committee] called on them to take more responsibility for searching for illegal content,” she said.

“The select committee recommended that they should be more proactive in searching for and taking down illegal and extremist content, and to invest more of their profits in moderation.

“News that Google will now proactively scan content and fund the trusted flaggers who were helping to moderate their own site is therefore important and welcome, though there is still more to do.”

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