The online space is home to a lot of things, some good; others, not so much. On the more degenerate side of things, those that incite acts of hate and violence have made a home on the internet, going as far as even perpetrating terrorist activities, and other radical movements.
Meta has made the decision to lead a collaborative initiative to support the expansion of industry efforts in the detection and removal of content related to terrorism in order to help protect against these dangerous influences. To do this, Meta’s releasing its Hasher-Matcher-Actioner (HMA) tool, which identifies image copies of the source material itself.
Do Not Condone
Meta released an overview of the goal of its HMA system, which it says is to help identify offensive content without redistributing it for this purpose, effectively limiting instances of such material, while still enabling detection.
The announcement of the broader launch of HMA comes as Meta also prepares to take on the chair role for the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT)’s Operating Board, which is a collection of tech companies that have banded together to essentially push back online terrorist content through research, technical collaboration, and knowledge sharing.
With the help of tools like the HMA, Meta hopes to increase collaboration during its tenure in the position.
As per Meta:
“The more companies participate in the hash sharing database the better and more comprehensive it is — and the better we all are at keeping terrorist content off the internet, especially since people will often move from one platform to another to share this content.”
Meta says that it’s made big advances in the detection and removal of harmful content, with terror-related material now seeing far less reach across Facebook and Instagram. However, its messaging apps are also moving, by default, towards full encryption, which could counteract all of the work Meta has put in thus far. That’s where newer implementations such as the HMA system come in, ideally helping Meta combat such on all fronts, while still aligning with evolving consumer privacy expectations.
The Wrap
This is a critical area for all platforms and not just Meta, while some are now softening their approach to some forms of potential hate speech. All in all, the lessons learned over time and after many cases are seemingly helping to address issues like this, limiting the spread of dangerous movements.
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