Summary
In 2025, GIFCT launched the Investigators Community of Practice (ICOP), an evolution of GIFCT’s traditional Working Group structure focused on trust & safety (T&S) practitioners at member companies and featured periodic strategic engagement from key multistakeholder participants. The community of practice format was decided upon following positive feedback from GIFCT’s 2024 Gaming Community of Practice, which examined ways to improve gaming platform safety practices. The community of practice primarily aims to address challenges faced by member companies and explore potential GIFCT solutions. It also focuses on closing knowledge gaps, which is supported by targeted engagement with select stakeholders.
Each ICOP session was structured to explore the challenges that GIFCT members face, and was guided by two questions:
- Threat landscape: What are novel characteristics found in Terrorist and Violent Extremist (TVE) content online, and how do these characteristics present challenges to content moderation?
- GIFCT Solutions/ Information Sharing: What resources are needed to enable digital platforms to make responsible decisions about TVE content, and what role does GIFCT play in the delivery of such solutions?
These guiding questions helped to inform the group’s direction throughout the course of its convenings. The findings that emerged from ICOP identified trends and opportunities in both the threat landscape and GIFCT’s technical solutions, tools, and resources. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, and as GIFCT continues to diversify its membership, creating adaptable solutions informed by industry feedback is critical to empowering the work of member T&S teams.
Sessions
Industry Engagement
Contrasting previous GIFCT efforts focused on scaled technical and policy framework solutions, ICOP took a more granular approach by exploring challenges and best practices of daily T&S work. Through members-only sessions, industry participants had a rare opportunity to get feedback and share lessons learned with peers. Some of these sessions included presentations about:
- Investigating potential illegal activity
- Building investigative capacity
- Investigating hybrid harms
Multistakeholder Engagement
Based on needs discovered through initial industry sessions, GIFCT scheduled multistakeholder engagements to impart expert knowledge to members and inform future solutions. These included:
- Expert briefing on semiotics and aesthetics in TVE propaganda.
- Briefings and resource production on the overlap of TVE and child harms.
- Engagements with regional law enforcement entities to consolidate guidance for reporting imminent threats to life.
Key Findings
Threat Landscape
- Cross Platform: TVE actors continue to compartmentalize their activities across multiple platforms. This creates unique challenges for digital platforms: limiting visibility of the holistic threat picture. As an example, TVE actors might seek to coax potential victims of abuse or recruitment to different platforms, dividing signals that both platforms may use to detect harm.
- Hybrid Harms: TVE actors have increasingly engaged in harm activities which blur the lines of what is typically thought of as TVE. This includes actors expanding abuse into child harms or other criminal activities. This highlights a need for cross-harm coordination amongst safety teams on digital platforms.
GIFCT Solutions/ Information Sharing
- Non-Hashed Signal: To address the increasingly cross-platform nature of the threat landscape, ICOP found that GIFCT should continue seeking appropriate opportunities to facilitate non-hashed signal sharing. This additional sharing should be balanced with appropriate guardrails and done in consultation with a community of human-rights-oriented multistakeholder partners.
- Expertise Sharing: ICOP found that GIFCT should establish venues for member companies to share best practices with one another and facilitate opportunities for multistakeholder experts to lead discussions on their areas of expertise. This underscores the need for continued investment in research partnerships like GIFCT’s partnership with the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), and systems in place to ensure researcher findings are routed to the relevant stakeholders.
Impacts
GIFCT Compass
Building on key findings from both ICOP and the 2024 Hash Sharing Working Group, GIFCT has been developing a member portal, Compass. Compass gives members access to GIFCT’s suite of resources to support their T&S work, including bespoke knowledge products, intel bulletins, and guidebooks. Through Compass, GIFCT can organize resources produced internally and in partnership with our multistakeholders in a curated fashion. With Compass, GIFCT intends to continuously find ways to synthesize key findings and resources from expert researchers into formats that intuitively slot into existing member needs. This is intended to reduce friction and merge GIFCT’s existing suite of support into a more consolidated package.
Updated ISNDA
Findings from ICOP were used to shape GIFCT’s new Information Sharing Non-Disclosure Agreement (ISNDA). GIFCT’s new ISNDA seeks to lay the groundwork for new information-sharing solutions to complement GIFCT’s hash-sharing work. GIFCT hopes to continue ICOP’s work through the development of additional information-sharing solutions in upcoming Working Groups and Communities of Practice.
Why This Matters
As threat actors evolve, GIFCT remains committed to supporting our growing 35+ member platform responses to be both effective and respectful of human rights. GIFCT Working Groups and Communities of Practice offer GIFCT members and its global multistakeholder community an opportunity to engage with and provide feedback on GIFCT’s work and themes at the intersection of technology and counterterrorism.
Join GIFCT
Are you a tech company interested in strengthening your capacity to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online?
Apply for membership and meet with GIFCT’s Membership Advisory Program (MAP), which supports prospective member companies as they work towards full membership, as well as current GIFCT members in ensuring continued alignment with our membership criteria.
MAP provides tech platforms with tailored support designed to meet each company’s unique needs and in alignment with their priorities, such as:
- crafting and revising their policies and/or community guidelines,
- helping improve their human rights commitments, and
- strengthening their commitments to transparency reporting.
GIFCT’s membership spans the full spectrum of the tech stack – including social media, e-commerce, travel marketplaces, file sharing, financial services, and more – demonstrating that no matter your digital service or platform, GIFCT welcomes your engagement and invites you to join its community. To learn more, visit www.gifct.org.
