Have we just discovered another mechanism Big Tech uses to censor people?
Targeted accounts also included businesses, celebrities, influencers and others who “have nothing to do with terrorism,”
All were allegedly placed in a database of terror-linked accounts run by the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, or GIFCT, a nonprofit group intended to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist content across social media sites.
After adult performers who used rival sites allegedly had their names added to the GIFCT’s list, traffic to the rival sites drastically fell, the suits allege. Meanwhile, OnlyFans’ traffic and profits soared as the site became a household name.
The lawyers claim they have acquired a list of more than 21,000 Instagram accounts they say were unfairly tagged as potential terrorists
The GIFCT was formed by Meta, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google’s YouTube in 2017 in a joint effort to stop the spread of mass shooting videos and other terrorist material online. When a member of the group flags a photo, video or post as terrorist-related, a digital fingerprint called a “hash” is shared across all its members.
In effect, that means a bikini pic wrongly flagged as jihadist propaganda on Instagram can also be quickly censored on Twitter or YouTube, all without the poster or public knowing that it was placed on the list — much less how or why.
“Due to the proliferation of the GIFCT database, any mistaken classification of a video, picture or post as ‘terrorist’ content echoes across social media platforms, undermining users’ right to free expression on several platforms at once,” Electronic Frontier Foundation researchers Svea Windwehr and Jillian C. York wrote in 2020.
“While [the GIFCT’s system] sounds like an efficient approach to the challenging task of correctly identifying and taking down terrorist content, it also means that one single database might be used to determine what is permissible speech, and what is taken down — across the entire Internet,” the researchers added.