A body you may never have heard of is influencing decisions about content moderation that impact our region. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) was originally formed in 2017 by Microsoft, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter as a “shared industry database of ‘hashes’—unique digital ‘fingerprints’—for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos or images that we have removed from our services.” Since then, offline violence with an online aspect has become an increasing concern of policymakers, and they’ve turned to automated content moderation - and GIFCT- to address the online aspect of terrorism - a term that few legal systems, countries, or human rights experts agree on. At the same time, content from our region, including human rights documentation and important political speech, is increasingly impacted by these tools and policy decisions.
Join us for a Q&A with Nick Rasmussen, the Executive Director of GIFCT. GIFCT was recently revamped as an NGO with an Executive Director, an Independent Advisory Committee, and multiple working groups, and has been increasingly engaged in civil society.
