Microsoft Corp., Twitter Inc., Facebook Inc. and Google Inc.’s YouTube have come together to form a new partnership that aims to tackle terrorism.

Called the “Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism,” the group will not be sending drones into the Middle East but will instead be collaborating on the best ways to make their hosted consumer services “hostile” to terrorists and violent extremists. Hostile is their word, but translated what they’re trying to do is to prevent any terrorist-related content appearing on their respective services.

“The spread of terrorism and violent extremism is a pressing global problem and a critical challenge for us all,” Twitter said Monday in a statement on behalf of the group. “We take these issues very seriously, and each of our companies have developed policies and removal practices that enable us to take a hard line against terrorist or violent extremist content on our hosted consumer services.” Explaining the joint effort, the statement added that all four companies believe that “by working together, sharing the best technological and operational elements of our individual efforts, we can have a greater impact on the threat of terrorist content online.”

The new group will focus on a number of key areas to tackle what they describe as “ever-evolving terrorist and extremist tactics.” They include technical solutions such as the establishment of a “Shared Industry Hash Database” and the development of best practices and transparency reporting removals.

They also plan to do research, described in a rather Orwellian manner as the development of guidance for their “counter-speech efforts.” Finally, there will be knowledge-sharing, working jointly with counterterrorism experts to engage in “shared learning about terrorism.”

While starting with the big four in terms of social networks and sharing, the group itself intends to be altruistic in working with and providing information to smaller companies that support their efforts in taking terrorist content offline.

All four companies have been targeted previously for hosting content from terrorist organizations. Twitter and YouTube in particular attracted criticism for content on their core products, while the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger app is also a favorite for finger-pointing politicians.

Whether the new group can achieve more in uniting the four companies in their fight against this sort of content is yet to be seen. Bt as a public relations exercise, it ticks all the boxes.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons