The third Ministerial meeting of the EU Internet Forum was held yesterday, 6 December 2017, in Brussels.
The meeting was hosted by Commissioner for Migration, Home Affairs and Citizenship, Dimitris Avramopoulos, and Commissioner for the Security Union, Julian King.
The aim of the meeting was to take stock of the progress made over the past year on curbing terrorist content online and to decide on next steps in this area.
In addition to high level EU member state representatives, the meeting gathered representatives from, amongst others, Google/You Tube, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, Justpaste.it, Snap, WordPress and Yellow, Europol, the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network (RAN), the European Strategic Communications Network (ESCN), and UNCTED (United Nations Counterterrorism Executive Directorate).
VOX-Pol was represented by our Coordinator, Prof. Maura Conway, and VOX-Pol’s Ms. Programme Manager, Lisa McInerney.
Major platforms participating in the EU Internet Forum are increasingly developing automatic tools for detection and removal of terrorist content online.
The Forum highlighted the need to exploit the now fully operational database of known terrorist content (“the database of hashes”). The database was launched in spring 2017 and now comprises over 40,000 hashes of known terrorist videos and images. This would increase exponentially when companies start feeding the database.
The EU Commission’s official press release about the event may be accessed HERE.