Some of the web's biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.
The move is a major step forward for internet companies eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.
YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.
The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites.
It looks for "hashes", a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.
Such a system would catch attempts to repost content already identified as unacceptable, but would not automatically block videos not been seen before.
The companies would not confirm they were using the method or talk about how it might be employed, but numerous people familiar with the technology said posted videos could be checked against a database of banned content to identify new postings of, say, a beheading or a lecture inciting violence.
The two sources would not discuss how much human work went into reviewing videos identified as matches or near-matches by the technology. They also would not say how videos in the databases were initially identified as extremist.
Most websites have relied until now mainly on users to flag content that violated their terms of service, and many still do. Flagged material is then individually reviewed by human editors who delete postings found to be in violation.
The companies using automation are not publicly discussing it, two sources said, in part out of concern that terrorists might learn how to manipulate their systems or that repressive regimes might insist the technology be used to censor opponents.
"There's no upside in these companies talking about it," said Matthew Prince, chief executive of content distribution company CloudFlare. "Why would they brag about censorship?"
The two people familiar with the still-evolving industry practice confirmed it to Reuters after the Counter Extremism Project publicly described its content-blocking system for the first time last week and urged big internet companies to adopt it.
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