Google’s subsidiary Jigsaw has open-sourced a counterterrorism tool designed to aid smaller companies in managing extremist content on their platforms.
While major tech companies like Meta, X, and Google have robust content moderation systems, smaller digital companies often lack the resources to effectively filter out illegal or harmful content. This challenge is heightened by regulations such as Europe’s Digital Services Act (DSA) and terrorism-specific content laws, which demand swift removal of illicit content.
Jigsaw, originally Google Ideas before its rebranding in 2016, focuses on developing tools to address societal issues such as disinformation, censorship, and online extremism. Last November, Jigsaw introduced Altitude, an online content moderation tool that helps moderators verify flagged content against third-party databases, streamlining the moderation process.
Altitude was created in collaboration with Tech Against Terrorism, a UN Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) initiative, and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which includes major tech companies as members.
Now, Jigsaw has transferred Altitude to Tech Against Terrorism, which will continue its development and maintenance. The tool’s code is available on GitHub under an Apache 2.0 license, allowing companies to self-host and third parties to inspect the code.
Altitude aggregates data from trusted sources like GIFCT and Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform. This consolidation enables moderators to efficiently review and remove flagged content, ensuring compliance with legal obligations. Altitude does not automatically remove content but flags potential extremist material for human review.
The platforms likely to use Altitude include messaging apps, URL-shortening services, video-hosting sites, online forums, social networks, and pastebins. Jigsaw conducted extensive interviews with various platform leaders to understand their needs and preparedness for managing extremist content.
Jigsaw stated in a blog post:
“Over the course of a year, Jigsaw conducted interviews with founders, trust and safety leaders, and TVEC content reviewers at eleven platforms, ranging in size. Platforms included image-sharing platforms, social media sites, URL shortening services, and file and text storage sites. We found that platforms existed along a scale of resourcing and preparedness to manage TVEC, and that that level of preparedness was not neatly related to the size of their organization or user base. Even relatively mature services still sometimes lacked signals to proactively identify harms on their platform. We also saw that, while they may eventually prefer to integrate all tools into an in-house platform, a separate interface for dedicated harms could provide a way to get started in an under-resourced environment.”
As an open-source project, Altitude can be integrated into any platform, or companies can work with Tech Against Terrorism for tailored onboarding support. Future plans include adding specialized databases and expanding language support beyond English.
Source: Techcrunch
