Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s administratively housed U.S. Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) Task Force and the United Kingdom’s Home Office provided a demonstration of a new online educational training course, “Countering Terrorists Exploitation of Social Media and the Internet,” to members of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). This training was first announced by DHS Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen in February 2018 at the 2018 Digital Forum on Terrorism Prevention.
With 300 hours of content uploaded every minute to content service platforms, identifying and removing or blocking terrorist content has been a challenge for companies, especially smaller startups with limited resources to manage.
This online 90-minute training is designed to educate startup companies and social media companies about how terrorists may seek to exploit their platforms. This narrated course includes videos and images of official and unofficial terrorist media products, quizzes to test knowledge, as well as supplementary notes pages to explore select topics in greater detail.
The majority of the training examines the online activities of ISIS, al‑Qa’ida, and these two groups’ supporters, as well as White Supremacist Extremists. The final section of the training course highlights select initiatives where governments and industry have worked either together or independently to counter this threat. This section is designed to highlight the significant progress made to date in countering terrorist exploitation of social media and the internet and to encourage additional thinking about how to continue collaboration on this issue.
Companies interested in gaining access to the training can request it on Tech Against Terrorism’s Knowledge Sharing Platform or reach out to contact@techagainstterrorism.org with the subject line “Training”.
