Today, GIFCT publishes its 2023 Annual and Transparency Report. This marks our fifth year producing a report in line with the vision and commitment to transparency that we share with our tech company members.
As GIFCT has continued to grow and evolve as a non-profit organization working with the tech industry, we have also iterated on how best to provide information on our progress. For 2023, we have combined our traditional annual report and a transparency report on our progress with industry into one publication. This past year saw us welcome new staff, expand our members with several new companies joining, and work with industry and civil society to reinforce our mission to prevent and counter terrorist and violent extremist exploitation of digital platforms. We are proud of what we have achieved together and look forward to working with our members and partners to continue to deliver on our mission.
Our new Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink joined in the summer of 2023 and received a warm welcome from staff, members, our Operating Board, and our Independent Advisory Committee, as well as our global partners. Five tech companies became members, bringing the total number of GIFCT members to 27 by the end of 2023. We are grateful to Meta, our 2023 Operating Board Chair, for their active engagement and support throughout the year and for hosting the 2023 Global Summit, as well as several events bringing together our members and community.
We responded to new developments in the online threat landscape and continued to strengthen our efforts to support our members and partners in responding to terrorist and violent extremist content online. Through our Incident Response Framework (IRF), GIFCT and our members initiated communications in response to over 175 terrorist/mass violence events or significant online terrorist or violent extremist developments to share situational awareness and emerging information to identify attempts of online exploitation on our members’ platforms. In 2023, GIFCT activated the Content Incident Protocol in response to a shooting in Louisville, Kentucky, United States live-streamed by the perpetrator, and the Incident level of the IRF in response to the Hamas attack on October 7. These activations enabled swift and collaborative action amongst GIFCT members to share information and address content relating to these events that violated their platform policies.
To disrupt and prevent the further spreading of identified terrorist and violent extremist content online, we continued contributing to GIFCT’s hash-sharing database, growing the number of hashes to approximately 390,000 distinct items of terrorist and violent extremist content in the forms of images, videos, and texts.
To adapt to emerging methods that terrorists and violent extremists use to exploit the internet, GIFCT’s team worked with members and stakeholders to study key trends that inform effective solutions. Through our research arm, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), we delivered over 150 research Insights, 10 reports, and 12 events. GIFCT published a report on borderline content, bespoke member knowledge products, and—by convening its multi-stakeholder Working Groups—handbooks, reports, playbooks, and video explainers on valuable topics related to preventing and countering terrorism and violent extremism. This important resource ensures that our members and partners can access global expertise and experts to deepen understanding about events and dynamics across the globe that are shaping online threats and opportunities.
Our mission is global; no single sector can alone address these threats and no individual company can effectively counter the threat online. Only by working together, as industry and with other sectors, can we harness the expertise, insights, and technology necessary to counter terrorism and violent extremism. As such, GIFCT is proud to work with industry, government, and civil society partners to ensure that our work is informed by diverse perspectives from around the world. We look forward to what more we will achieve together in 2024.
2023 Annual & Transparency Report
