The following is an Insight from GIFCT’s Membership & Programs Lead, Dr. Nagham El Karhili, and Spring Fellow, Sarah Chittick.
This Insight reflects on recent updates to the guide to GIFCT and Member Resources, which can be found here.
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) brings together multiple sectors – including the technology industry, government, civil society, and academia – to foster collaboration, capacity development, and information-sharing. As a unique tech-led initiative, GIFCT fosters multi-stakeholder engagement and cross-platform information sharing to achieve our mission of preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. Part of our wider work to support a diverse set of companies, GIFCT has worked closely with our members to update our guide to GIFCT and Member Resources. This document showcases GIFCT and member company efforts to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms, in line with our membership criteria.
The guide now includes updated resources and functionality, making it easier to learn from and compare the wide array of approaches to preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. These updates include:
- Revised appendices which share GIFCT resources and offer the ability to filter and view GIFCT member company resources by 32 member companies, 12 company types, and our membership criteria
- Additional information on GIFCT resources, Working Group outputs, and the support GIFCT offers to current and prospective member companies
- Current information on how GIFCT supports diverse approaches to fulfilling our membership criteria
Overall, we are excited to share a guide that better showcases the diversity of our member companies as well as our multi-stakeholder approach to fulfilling our mission to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.
How GIFCT Supports Diverse Trust and Safety Efforts
At GIFCT, one of the ways we meet the cross-platform and transnational challenges of terrorism and violent extremism is by supporting a varying set of trust and safety efforts on digital platforms.
The guide to GIFCT and Member Resources highlights a wide array of approaches to fulfilling our membership criteria. This diversity of approaches is an asset to the tech industry, representing an opportunity for our member companies to address the evolving threat landscape. Currently, GIFCT has over thirty member companies representing twelve different platform types (with many of our companies falling into more than one category) with nearly 20% of our members based outside of the USA.
Even as member companies differ in many ways, there are similarities that serve as a model for other digital platforms seeking to grow their trust and safety efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism. Aiding efforts to learn from and compare company approaches, the guide now has the ability to filter member company resources by company, type, and membership criteria.
We hope this functionality will be a valuable tool for prospective member companies and other digital platforms who seek to develop their own efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism by bringing together examples of how our member companies approach this work. Similarly, as working with civil society and upholding human rights principles have long been core to GIFCT’s work, we also hope that this feature will be a tool for civil society, government, and researchers who seek to better understand trust and safety efforts being carried out by GIFCT and member companies.
Key Reflections
Depending on size, surfaces, content hosted, and regional legal requirements, tech companies showcase various resources with the same common aim of making online spaces safe. Based on our review of member company resources, we identified a few good practices for digital platforms seeking to further their efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism.
- GIFCT member companies offer numerous resources for safety and reporting and the majority of GIFCT member companies have safety portals or hubs which bring together policies, reporting options, and instructions to guide users in reporting content or activities. We see safety hubs as a best practice and, where applicable, recommend the use and expansion of these hubs.
- An ideal safety hub brings together policies prohibiting terrorism and violent extremism, safety and reporting tools, information on how the company is exploring new technical solutions, transparency reports, human rights commitments, and resources in support of civil society efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism.
- Relatedly, while all member companies maintain publicly available policies prohibiting terrorism and/or violent extremism, companies should consider how easily this information can be found on their websites and their methods of communication.
- A good practice would be to include additional platform appropriate methods for communicating these policies in the simplest terms and with platform specific examples.
- Finally, where such public resources exist, companies should consider how to make it easier for civil society to find resources in support of counterspeech, counter-narrative, and digital literacy.
- This will allow for greater engagement and transparency, and contribute to deepening digital safety through awareness raising, education, and information sharing.
GIFCT’s Direction
As reflected in GIFCT’s 2025-2027 Strategic Plan, terrorists and violent extremists are increasingly diffused and decentralized. As new technologies emerge, GIFCT aims to expand its global membership to support digital platforms – large and small – seeking to make their platforms inhospitable to threat actors. GIFCT’s approach has always been grounded in respect for a growing community of member companies and multi-stakeholder engagement. We will continue to evolve with the threat landscape, focused on support for our member companies and multi-stakeholder partners.
Overall, this guide to GIFCT and Members Resources showcases the diversity of our member companies and our multi stakeholder approaches to fulfilling our mission to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. As we consider plans for 2025 and beyond, this guide highlights the importance of investing in and growing trust and safety efforts, and our approach grounded in support for the varying needs of the tech industry.
To read the guide and learn more about our work, please visit https://gifct.org/resource-guide/.
