CDT Says Tech Industry Effort to Curb Terrorist Content May Lead to Censorship

Tech industry collaboration to remove terrorist propaganda sets a “troubling precedent,” Center for Democracy and Technology said Tuesday. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube pledged Monday to curb the spread of terrorist content. “CDT is deeply concerned that this joint project will create a precedent for cross-site censorship and will become a target for governments and private actors seeking to suppress speech across the web,” wrote CDT Free Expression Project Director Emma Llansó in a blog post. The companies buckled to pressure from governments in the U.S., EU and elsewhere, commencing “a dangerous slide down the slippery slope to centralized censorship of speech online,” she said. Google blogged Monday that the companies would create a shared industry database of hashes for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos and images they removed from services. “By sharing this information with each other, we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on our respective hosted consumer platforms,” Google said. The company didn’t comment Tuesday on the CDT post.