Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech's Anti-Terrorism Group

A WIRED investigation reveals TikTok ’s bid to join the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism ( GIFCT ) failed because two of the four executives on the board abstained from voting on its application.

The four tech giants have presided over the consortium since they announced it in 2016 , when Western governments were berating them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded.

GIFCT uses technology to spot problematic content they spot to a database.

Members can then compare the millions of hashes in the database against posts they should remove.

X reported this month that it suspended over 57,000 accounts in the first half of this year for violating its violent and hateful entities policy.

X had signaled it wouldn’t pay up and would therefore forfeit its seat.

GIFCT insists innocuous content rarely ends up in the database.

But the board hasn’t allowed outside auditing or ordered comprehensive internal reviews.

GIFCT commissioned a human rights impact assessment from the consulting firm BSR that was published in 2021 and recommended 47 changes.

Some critics of how GIFCT has run the counterterrorism forum say the companies already have a playbook to protect legitimate speech.