Next month, Meta assumes the chair of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)’s Operating Board. GIFCT is an NGO that brings together technology companies to tackle terrorist content online through research, technical collaboration and knowledge sharing. Meta is a founding member of GIFCT, which was established in 2017 and has evolved into a nonprofit organization following the 2019 Christchurch Call , which combines member businesses, governments plus civil society organizations to tackle terrorist and violent extremist content material online.
Meta is also making available a free open source software tool it has developed that will help platforms identify copies of images or videos and take action against them en masse. We hope the particular tool — called Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) — will be adopted by a range of companies to help them stop the spread of terrorist content on their platforms, and will be especially useful for smaller businesses who don’t have the same resources as bigger ones. HMA builds on Meta’s previous open up source image and video matching software program , and can be used for any type of violating content.
Member companies of the GIFCT often use what’s called a hash sharing database in order to help keep their systems free of terrorist content. Instead of storing harmful or even exploitative articles like videos from chaotic attacks or terrorist propaganda, GIFCT stores a hash, or unique digital fingerprint for each image plus video. The more companies participate in the hash sharing database the better and more comprehensive it is — and the much better we all are at keeping terrorist content off the internet, especially since people will often move from one platform to another to share this content. But many businesses do not have the particular in-house technology capabilities to find and moderate violating content in high volumes, which is why HMA is really a potentially valuable tool.
Meta spent approximately $5 billion globally on safety and security last year, and it has more than 40, 000 people working on it. Within that, we have the team associated with hundreds of people dedicated to counter-terror work specifically, with expertise ranging from law enforcement and national security, to counterterrorism intelligence plus academic studies in radicalization.
Meta’s commitment to tackling terrorist content is part of a wider approach to protecting users from harmful content on our services. We’re a pioneer in developing AI technologies to remove hateful content material at scale. Hate speech is now viewed two times with regard to every 10, 000 views of articles on Facebook, down through 10-11 times per ten, 000 sights less than three years ago. We furthermore block millions of fake accounts every day so they can’t distribute misinformation, and have taken down more compared to 150 networks of malicious accounts worldwide since 2017.
We’ve learned over many years that if you run a social media operation in scale, you have to create rules and processes that are as transparent plus evenly applied as possible. That’s why all of us have detailed Community Standards setting out what isn’t acceptable upon our services, which are published openly and reviewed consistently. We publish reports every quarter detailing the progress we’re making on things like detecting hate speech and other dangerous content, the particular malicious systems we disrupt, and showing what content is the most seen on this services.
Of course , we are not perfect, and fair-minded people will certainly disagree while to whether the rules and processes we have are the right ones. Yet we take these issues seriously, try to act responsibly plus transparently, and invest huge amounts in keeping our platform safe. Many of these issues go way beyond any one company or institution. No one can solve them upon their own, which explains why cross-industry and cross-government collaborations like GIFCT plus the Christchurch Call are so important.