Meta says it will share software to try to fight terrorism and human trafficking

Meta, formerly Facebook, said it is opening up some of its technology to fight terrorism and human trafficking on the internet. He said he will allow other companies to share data and prevent the spread of violent images on the Internet.

This software will be shared ahead of Meta’s one-year chairmanship of the Global Internet Forum to Combat Terrorism (GIFCT), which begins in January.

Meta’s Hasher Matcher Actioner will be a free and open-source content moderation software tool “that will help platforms identify copies of images or videos and take action against them en masse,” said Nick Clegg, president of the Meta Global Business, in a statement.

The Hasher Matcher Actioner allows companies to find duplicate images by examining hashes or digital fingerprints. These fingerprints or hashes are created after images or videos pass through an algorithm developing a series of numbers or letters specific to that image, the company said.

The hash allows this data to be matched in bulk, allowing images that violate the platform’s terms of service to be quickly addressed and taken offline, a tool that Meta says will be useful for smaller tech platforms. .

Meta said it spent $5 billion on safety and security in 2021 and had more than 40,000 employees dedicated to the company’s online security efforts.

Meta is a founding member of GIFCT, a non-governmental organization created by tech companies in 2017 to fight extremist content online, including terrorism.

When a terrorist attack occurs, GIFCT works collaboratively to create a hash based on online video created by a perpetrator or accomplice in a terrorist attack. This hash allows companies to quickly remove offline images. GIFCT companies, including Microsoft, Airbnb, Amazon, and the current president YouTube, often use a hash-sharing database that works to block videos and images that violate their terms of service on their platforms.

Matthew Schmidt, associate professor of national security, international affairs, and political science at the University of New Haven, told ABC News that most organized terrorist or human trafficking events happen on the dark. web.

He said releasing open-source software is key to limiting where infringing content can appear. However, he said it was unclear how this would affect what happens on the dark web.

“The internet is infinite; there will be no good way to stop this from continuing, because they will just move elsewhere. Where the algorithm is not.”

Schmidt said most efforts to prevent the sharing of violent content have come from the private sector, not the government, which has relied on social media companies for moderation.

He said the government had allowed “private companies to set their own standards for speech, as we discussed with Twitter, and use those standards to prohibit behavior on their platforms.”

Companies work with law enforcement to then prosecute what they believe to be criminal behavior.

Dina Hussein, Counterterrorism & Dangerous Organizations Policy Lead at Meta, told ABC News that by sharing Meta’s Hasher Matcher Actioner, he would be able to help the Internet as a whole.

“What we hope to do is improve our baseline best practices for the entire industry,” Hussein said.

She added, “As long as this type of content exists in the world, it will show up on the internet. And it’s only by working collectively together that we can truly keep this content off the internet.”