,
8 tweets,
4 min read
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In the wake of the Christchurch shootings, tech platforms like YouTube have said it's harder to police terrorist content by white supremacists than it is to remove that of Islamic terrorists. That’s not the full story. Here’s what’s actually going on 1/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
The crux of the tech companies’ argument is that it’s easier to identify content related to known terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts 2/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
That might be so, but critics say they have not seen evidence that tech is inherently more adept at identifying ISIS-related content than right-wing extremist content. Platforms built these tools and engineered them to address a specific kind of threat 3/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH 
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter, is a voluntary organization that can collect content from white nationalists as well as ISIS and Al Qaeda 4/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
But they have focused more on building a database of what ISIS-related content looks like, reinforcing law enforcement’s blind spots, and then fed this skewed data to surveillance systems, perpetuating a cycle of bias 5/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
Critics say law enforcement is hamstrung in combating white supremacists by inadequate tools, such as the lack of a domestic terrorism law. In reality, it's probably more of a business decision molded by political pressure
6/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
6/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
Tech platforms have shown they can detect and remove terrorist content—the Global Internet Forum has a database with 100,000 digital fingerprints of known terrorist content in 2018 alone—they just need to start treating all online terrorism the same 7/ wired.trib.al/wT0jKTH
For more context from 4/ here's the full tweet with information on white nationalist social media accounts
