In the wake of the tragic violence in Charlottesville earlier this month, it’s even more evident that online extremism continues to pose serious threats to society. While battling extremism is an important step in preventing the spread of hate and violence around the world, there are many inherent challenges, including the sheer volume of daily posts, complexity of purpose for videos, and the need to adhere to free speech rights.  In spite of these challenges, industry has been committed to this effort for many years—we’ve highlighted some of this in the past, including industry efforts to cooperate with law enforcement, and formation of a partnership to fight terrorism.

Terrorists and other hate groups like al-Qaeda, ISIS, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis use social media and video streaming platforms to publish and spread their hateful and offensive content for radicalization, propaganda, or organizational purposes. After the recent tragic events in Charlottesville, the tech community has been figuring out ways to respond.  Platforms have increased the rate of which they either take down white supremacist content or make it harder to find.  But, many companies and platforms have been flagging and taking down such harmful for a long while, especially pertaining to terrorist content.

Last week, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova announced that she was going to propose a law on law enforcement access to encrypted data.

Government officials and onlookers have properly inquired into what social media platforms are doing to stop the spread of terrorist content on the internet.  And, social media companies for years have maintained complex, nuanced and evolving policies and practices that allow them to identify this content and act responsibly in the face of enormous challenges, particularly to monitor their networks and work to expeditiously remove it. Going a step further, a group of leading internet companies announced yesterday the formation of a partnership to combat terrorism online.  Specifically, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube—and potentially other companies to be joining in the future—have come together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online, announcing the decision to create a shared industry database of “hashes” — unique digital “fingerprints” — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or ...

Last week on July 14, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) USA hosted an interesting and, unfortunately, once again, timely panel discussion entitled: “Content and Conduct: Countering Violent Extremism and Promoting Human Rights Online.”  Courtney Radsch from the Committee to Protect Journalists ably moderated and asked pertinent questions throughout the conversation.  Yolanda Rondon from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and Matt Mitchell from Black Lives Matter provided a civil rights perspective.  J.D. Maddox from the State Department described what the U.S. government is doing to combat online violent extremism abroad.  I was on the panel to give SIIA’s view, which is informed by our diverse membership, which includes content and social media companies. Rondon and Mitchell eloquently described the potential dangers and dilemmas faced by policymakers in determining how ...

Yesterday, at George Washington University, an energetic panel of government officials, scholars and policy advocates from business and civil society discussed the role of tech companies in an age of international terrorism.  There is more to this thorny issue, but the panel began with a good outline of the issues at stake. The panel met at a sad time when the world is mourning the loss of life from the attacks in Brussels.  Coming after attacks in Paris, San Bernardino and Istanbul, we are clearly at a critical junction in the struggle against violent extremism.  And that made today’s topic tragically timely and relevant. So what are the responsibilities of tech companies in an age of international terrorism?  I’d say that they have three:

This past Friday, February 5, Twitter announced  - in a tweet, of course – that it had shut down more than 125,000 terrorism-related accounts since the middle of 2015, most of them linked to the Islamic State. The social media site removes accounts that are reported to them, and it also uses spam-fighting tools to identify and take down other violent accounts.  It works with public interest groups to encourage counter speech and reports violent accounts to the government.

This first appeared in InfoWorld’s Tech Policy Perspectives Column.

This first appeared in The Hill's Congress Blog.

A bill under consideration in the U.S. Senate would create an obligation for social media companies and others to report undefined “terrorist activity” to the U.S. government.  This terrible idea would bring innocent people under government surveillance for protected expression, while doing nothing to make us safer.  The Senate should drop the provision.