Press Release: Launching a public consultation process on the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP)

25 October 2019 - Press Release:

Launching a public consultation process on the Terrorism Contents Analytics Platform (TCAP)

The Terrorist Content Analytics Platform

In June this year, we announced that Tech Against Terrorism had been awarded a grant by the Canadian government to develop the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform (TCAP). The TCAP will be the world’s first free centralised platform of verified terrorist content. The platform will support smaller tech companies in swiftly and accurately identifying terrorist content discovered on their platforms, and will drive improved quantitative analysis of terrorist use of the internet. To that end, TCAP will be accessible for tech companies, academic researchers, and civil society.

Suggested workflow for the TCAP

Launching a public consultation process

In developing the TCAP, we are making considerations with regards to four key concerns:

• Rule of law
• Accuracy and Transparency
• Privacy and Security
• Tech platform autonomy

To fully understand these and other potential areas of concern, we will be opening a public consultation process to solicit feedback from experts within the tech sector, civil society, and academia. To date, we have already convened one consultation meeting on the fringes of the UN General Assembly week. You can read about some of our key conclusions from that meeting here. To add to these findings and ensure that relevant concerns are considered in the development of the platform, an online consultation process will be opened shortly.

Specifically, this consultation process will solicit feedback from the following sectors:

Smaller tech companies

We will seek input from smaller tech companies to establish which gaps the TCAP might be able to fill to support them in effectively tackling terrorist content and managing takedown requests and removal orders, as well as additional features useful for the TCAP to incorporate, such as optical character recognition (OCR) tools to transliterate non-English text in images.

Civil society

At Tech Against Terrorism, protecting human rights and freedom of speech when tackling terrorist use of the internet is our key aim. As such, we will seek input from civil society groups to ensure that we consider concerns with regards to online freedom of expression, privacy, and other relevant human rights issues.

Academia and expert researchers

We will ask researchers on how the platform can support and improve their research efforts, in particular with regards to quantitative analysis and the innovative use of data science and artificial intelligence. We will also ask researchers to provide advice on issues relating to research ethics and mental health safeguarding for researchers and content moderators.

We very much welcome feedback from the above stakeholders, and will be sharing more information shortly. This process will be followed by virtual and in-person consultation meetings. If you have any questions about the consultation process or the TCAP, please get in touch with us on contact@techagainstterrorism.org.

Background to Tech Against Terrorism

Tech Against Terrorism is an initiative launched by the United Nations Counter Terrorism Executive Directorate (UN CTED) in April 2017. We support the global technology sector in responding to terrorist use of the internet whilst respecting human rights, and we work to promote public-private partnerships to mitigate this threat. Our research shows that terrorist groups - both jihadist and far-right terrorists - consistently exploit smaller tech platforms when disseminating propaganda. At Tech Against Terrorism, our mission is to support smaller tech companies in tackling this threat whilst respecting human rights and to provide companies with practical tools to facilitate this process. As a public-private partnership, the initiative has been supported by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and the governments of Spain, Switzerland, the Republic of Korea, and Canada.

For any questions or media requests, please get in touch with us on contact@techagainstterrorism.org