The British Home Office unveiled a new technology Tuesday that it said can detect extremist content on any online platform with a high degree of accuracy.

Tests have shown this new tool can automatically detect 94 percent of Daesh [an acronym for ISIS] propaganda with 99.995 percent accuracy,” said a government press release. “It has an extremely high degree of accuracy, for instance if it analyses 1 million randomly selected videos, only 50 would require additional human review.”

The tool can be used on any platform and can be integrated into the upload process, said the press release. Home Secretary Amber Rudd said the government may even make tech companies use it by law.

Rudd will visit Silicon Valley this week to discuss the technology and “hold a series of meetings with the main communication service providers to discuss tackling terrorist content online.” On her two-day tour, she will also meet with Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen.

The technology in question was created by the Home Office and ASI Data Science and uses machine learning artificial intelligence to analyse audio and video and determine whether it contains any extremist content. The government spent £600,000 (roughly $833,000) developing the technology, running thousands of hours of extremist content through the program.

The government said that while larger platforms such as Google LLC and Facebook Inc. have the resources to detect such extremism, smaller platforms don’t. Home Office analysis determined that Daesh supporters used more than 400 platforms to push their agenda just in 2017. It added that 145 of these platforms used between July and the end of the year had not been used before by extremists.

“It’s a very convincing example of the fact that you can have the information you need to make sure this material doesn’t go online in the first place,” said Judd. “The technology is there. There are tools out there that can do exactly what we’re asking for. For smaller companies, this could be ideal.”

Asked if the government may force smaller platforms to use the technology Judd said that the government is not ruling out “taking legislative action if we need to do it.”

Such a technology that prevents content appearing online as it is uploaded has also sparked controversy, with supporters of free speech saying such a thing could be a dangerous censorship tool. Even with a high degree of accuracy, critics say, there could be a lot of false positive when used with a major distributor of video content.

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— Alec Muffett (@AlecMuffett) February 13, 2018

Image: Josh Hallett via Flickr