Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube to cooperate against ‘terrorist content'

ASTANA. KAZINFORM The world's biggest social networks announced a new initiative to combat spreading "terrorist content" on the Internet, Kazinform has learnt from RIA Novosti.

"There is no place for content that promotes terrorism on our hosted consumer services. When alerted, we take swift action against this kind of content in accordance with our respective policies", the companies said in a joint statement.

The companies will be sharing unique digital hashes of images and videos that contain terrorist propaganda. This will make it easier for them to identify the imagery and remove this kind of content from the Internet. The companies have noted that users' personal information will not be shared.

A joint initiative might come as a response to the attempts to hold them accountable for the terrorist content shared on their platforms.

The same companies used a similar technique in the past to identify and remove child pornography. However, this time it is about sympathy for terrorism, which is much more difficult to classify than something directly prohibited by the law. Therefore, it was agreed that for the time being the content will not be removed automatically.