Project Background

Tech Against Terrorism  

Tech Against Terrorism is an initiative supported by the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Executive Directorate (UN CTED), and was launched in April 2017. The official launch followed a first phase convened in April 2016, entitled ‘Private Sector Engagement in Responding to the Use of the Internet and ICT for Terrorist Purposes: Strengthening Dialogue and Building Trust’.7 Since 2019, Tech Against Terrorism is implemented by the Online Harms Foundation.8 Tech Against Terrorism is a public-private partnership and is funded by both the tech industry via the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) and by governments. To date, the governments of Spain, Republic of Korea, Switzerland, and Canada have provided financial support to Tech Against Terrorism. 

Our core aim at Tech Against Terrorism is to support the tech industry in building capacity to tackle the use of the internet for terrorist purposes whilst respecting human rights. We work with all types of tech companies, such as social media, pasting, file-storage, messaging, fintech platforms, and web infrastructure providers. The core mission of our work is about providing the global the industry with the tools needed to effectively tackle terrorist activity on their platforms. In doing so, we work across three workstreams: 

Tech Against Terrorism consists of an interdisciplinary team of counterterrorism policy experts, open-source intelligence analysts, and developers and data scientists. Our team composition allows us to comprehensively support the global tech industry in a manner that is effective, accurate, and human rights compliant.