Software ‘unveiled’ to fight online extremism

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WASHINGTON, June 18, (AFP): A software tool unveiled Friday aims to help online firms quickly find and eliminate extremist content used to spread and incite violence and attacks. The Counter Extremism Project, a nongovernment group based in Washington, proposed its software be used in a system similar to one used to prevent the spread on online child pornography.

The software was developed by Dartmouth University computer scientist Hany Farid, who also worked on the PhotoDNA system now widely used by Internet companies to stop the spread of content showing sexual exploitation or pornography involving children.

But social media firms have yet to commit to using the tool for extremist content, and some are skeptical about it, according to an industry source. The announcement comes amid growing concerns about radical jihadists using social networks to diffuse violent and gruesome content and recruit people for attacks.

Solution “We think this is the technological solution to combat online extremism,” said Mark Wallace, chief executive of the organization that includes former diplomats and public officials from the United States and other countries. The group proposed the creation of an independent “National Office for Reporting Extremism” that would operate in a similar fashion to the child pornography center — identifying and flagging certain content to enable online firms to automatically remove it.

This system, if adopted by Internet firms, “would go a long way to making sure than online extremist is no longer pervasive,” Wallace said during a conference call with journalists. He said it could be useful in stopping the “viral” spread of videos of beheadings and killings such as those produced by the Islamic State group. Wallace said he expects “robust debate” on what is acceptable content but added that “I think we could agree that the beheading videos, the drowning videos, the torture videos… should be removed.” Farid, who also spoke on the call, said he believes the new system would be an effective tool for companies that must now manually review each complaint on objectionable content.

“We are simply developing a technology that allows companies to accurately and effectively enforce their terms of service,” Farid said. The system is based on “robust hashing” or finding so-called digital signatures of content of text, images, audio and video that can be tracked to enable platforms to identify and stop content from being posted or reposted. “The technology has been developed, it has been tested and we are in the fi nal stages of engineering to get it ready for deployment,” Farid said. “We’re talking about a matter of months.”

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