The Home Office is providing funding and support for a new
project that will help to stop violent videos being shared
online after terrorist attacks.
The new funding, announced by the Prime Minister at the UN
General Assembly in New York, will support efforts to develop
industry-wide technology that can automatically identify
online videos which have been altered to avoid existing
detection methods, and help prevent them from being shared
online.
The announcement follows the Christchurch attack in New
Zealand in March, in which 51 people were killed and which
saw hundreds of different versions of the attacker’s
live-streamed video spread across online platforms, with
Facebook removing over 1.5 million uploads of the video from
their platform.
Many had been intentionally edited to evade current content
filters and, in some cases, it took days for them to be
removed.
UK data-science experts, supported by the Home Office, will
use the new funding to create an algorithm which any
technology company in the world can use, free of charge, to
improve the way that they detect violent and harmful videos
and prevent them being shared by their users.
Not only will this make it much harder for terrorist content
to be shared online but the outcomes of the research could
eventually also be used to help spot other types of harmful
content such as child sexual abuse.
Home Secretary MP today added:
The sharing of images of terrorist attacks has a
devastating effect on the families and loved ones of
victims and plays into terrorists’ hands by amplifying
their twisted messages.
The UK has a track record of showing that state of the art
technology can be developed, in partnership with industry,
at relatively low cost and this is just the latest example
of our commitment to working with industry to tackle our
shared challenges and respond to the ever evolving threats
which we face.
The announcement further demonstrates the UK’s role as a
world leader in online safety as it continues to build on the
shared commitments to work with industry in the fight against
terrorism online which were made at the Home Secretary hosted
Five Country Ministerial meeting in London earlier this year.
This announcement also honours the commitments made in the
Christchurch Call to Action to tackle terrorist use of the
internet, which world leaders signed up to at a summit in
Paris in May.
