GIFCT Criticism Reiterates Need for Industrywide Standards for Online Extremist Content Removal.
On Wednesday, the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing on social media companies’ efforts to counter online terror content and misinformation. The hearing was called in the wake of March’s New Zealand mosque shootings—in which a terrorist killed 51 people and livestreamed it all on Facebook. A full 24 hours after the livestream, Facebook failed to remove 300,000 reuploads of the attack video. A week later, and then a month later, the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) discovered that the video was still widely available. Tech’s failure to prevent reuploads of known terrorist content sheds light on the failings and ineffectiveness of the industry-led Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT).