Promoting and protecting human rights is central to GIFCT’s mission. As GIFCT grows its membership and expands its suite of technical solutions, tools, and resources, it continues to recognize the critical importance of integrating human rights considerations into all aspects of its work.
GIFCT’s Human Rights Policy, first adopted in 2022 after undertaking the Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA), which created a set of guidelines to ground GIFCT’s work in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs), informs GIFCT’s ongoing dialogue with current and prospective members as well as its community of multi-stakeholder partners. This policy and related human rights work align with our commitment to ground our efforts to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity in human rights principles. Four years later, we’re updating it to reflect contemporary realities and its applicability to our work of helping tech platforms prevent, respond, and adapt to online threats by adding a comprehensive human rights due diligence framework. These updates, informed by member and multi-stakeholder feedback over recent years, reflect progress towards strengthening our human rights policies and practices.
As outlined within Principle 17, human rights due diligence is a key element of the UNGPs, which sit at the core of all human rights-related activity at GIFCT. This Principle further clarifies that “the process [of human rights due diligence] should include assessing actual and potential human rights impacts, integrating and acting upon the findings, tracking responses, and communicating how impacts are addressed.” Fundamentally, human rights due diligence is the ongoing, iterative process of assessing risks, taking action to mitigate them, tracking impacts and actions, and communicating them transparently and clearly to stakeholders.
Our due diligence framework is structured around Principles 18-21 of the UNGPs. For each of these areas of our work, we assess human rights impacts, take action to mitigate them, track outcomes, and communicate findings transparently in line with our Human Rights Policy.
Guided by our strategic pillars of preventing, responding, and adapting to terrorist and violent extremist exploitation of online spaces, our human rights work is mainstreamed across all our workstreams and embedded within our four key tools. These tools include our hash-sharing database (HSDB); our Incident Response Framework (IRF); GIFCT knowledge products and the support of our academic research wing, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET); and convening events, Working Groups, and frameworks for cross-sector and cross-platform knowledge sharing and collaboration.
Strategic Pillar I: Prevent
Our Prevent pillar focuses on technical tools, including the HSDB, which allows member platforms to share “digital fingerprints” of known terrorist and violent extremist content in a secure, efficient, and privacy-protecting manner, and action content in line with their respective policies and terms of service. GIFCT also recently launched the updated version of the Campaign Toolkit, a website designed to help activists of any type take action to prevent terrorism and violent extremism online. Human rights due diligence for this pillar will include human rights-related assessment tools for new and existing technical initiatives and ensuring specific metrics for measuring the effectiveness and impact of GIFCT’s technical tools.
Strategic Pillar II: Respond
The Response pillar is grounded in our IRF, which is the mechanism that helps member companies respond to online dimensions of offline violence and address related digital content. In 2025, GIFCT launched an updated version of the IRF to better respond to the evolving threat landscape. Through this development, GIFCT has continued to include a human rights impact assessment in all IRF activations, including the identification of lessons learned and integration of these findings into future iterations.
Strategic Pillar III: Adapt
Our adapt pillar encompasses GIFCT research and tailored analysis, the support of GNET, and our regional workshops and multi-stakeholder forums, which foster strong regional partnerships with experts, governments, and practitioners and facilitate cross-sector exchanges of lessons learned and good practices. Due diligence for our Adapt workstreams includes ensuring human rights as a core research theme and maintaining a register of risks identified through research and multi-stakeholder engagement to underpin GIFCT’s work.
Working Groups
Working Groups are critical opportunities for multi-stakeholder dialogue and collaboration, with each new set of yearly Working Groups tackling key issues, themes, and developments at the intersections of technology and counterterrorism. Human rights due diligence for these convenings includes ensuring human rights as a central theme integrated into research questions, involving human rights experts in these dialogues, and publishing human rights-related outcomes within outputs.
Transparency
Transparency is a core value in both principle and practice across GIFCT’s efforts to prevent, respond to, adapt to, and share knowledge about terrorist and violent extremist exploitation of digital platforms. To ensure ongoing transparency of GIFCT’s work, we have specifically included efforts to develop ways to monitor and assess our progress and provide public reporting. Due diligence in this area focuses on our annual transparency reports, continuation and development of human rights as a central theme within our multi-stakeholder forums, and oversight and input from our cross-sector stakeholders, including via Working Groups, events, and our Independent Advisory Committee (IAC).
Looking Ahead
To further our human rights focus at GIFCT, we are developing a report highlighting our activity over the past five years in relation to our HRIA conducted by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) in 2021. This five-year review will also set the roadmap for upcoming priority areas relating to human rights. GIFCT will also strengthen its internal human rights capacities and transition its services, formerly delivered in partnership with BSR, in-house to the Membership Advisory Program, further streamlining and improving its ability to support prospective and current members with rights-respecting policies and practices.
