In 2016, the founding member companies of GIFCT (Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube), created a shared industry database of “hashes” — unique digital “fingerprints” — of known violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment videos that had been removed from their services. The image or video is “hashed” in its raw form and is not linked to any original platform or user data. Hashes appear as a numerical representation of the original content and can’t be reverse engineered to create the image and/or video. A platform needs to find a match with a given hash on their platform in order to see what the hash corresponds with. The Hash Sharing Consortium currently consists of 13 companies who have access to the shared industry database. This includes, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Ask.fm, Cloudinary, Instagram, JustPaste.it, LinkedIn, Verizon Media, Reddit, Snap, and Yellow. No access to non-industry members has been granted. Each consortium member can decide how they would like to use the database, keeping in mind their own user terms of service, as well as how they operate and how they make use of both technical and human capabilities.
