UK govt plans project to help stop violent videos being shared online

The UK government is to fund and support a new project that will help stop violent videos being shared online after terrorist attacks.

UK Home Secretary Priti Patel said the action is aimed at preventing the twisted ideology of terrorists being amplified and will harness state-of-the-art technology to tackle the problem of such material being widely shared.

"The sharing of images of terrorist attacks has a devastating effect on the families and loved ones of victims and plays into terrorists' hands by amplifying their twisted messages, said Patel, Britain's senior-most Indian-origin Cabinet minister.

"The UK has a track record of showing that state-of-the-art technology can be developed, in partnership with industry, at relatively low cost and this is just the latest example of our commitment to working with industry to tackle our shared challenges and respond to the ever evolving threats which we face," she said.

The new UK funding, formally unveiled at the UN General Assembly in New York, will support efforts to develop industry-wide technology that can automatically identify online videos which have been altered to avoid existing detection methods, and help prevent them from being shared online.

The announcement follows the Christchurch attack in New Zealand in March, in which 51 people were killed and which saw hundreds of different versions of the attacker's live-streamed video spread across online platforms, with Facebook removing over 1.5 million uploads of the video from their platform.

Many of the videos had been intentionally edited to evade current content filters and, in some cases, it took days for them to be removed, the UK Home Office said.

Britain's data-science experts will use the new government funding to create an algorithm which any technology company in the world can use, free of charge, to improve the way that they detect violent and harmful videos and prevent them being shared by their users. Not only will this make it much harder for terrorist content to be shared online but the outcomes of the research could eventually also be used to help spot other types of harmful content such as child sexual abuse, the Home Office claimed.

The UK's latest announcement forms part of its commitment made in the Christchurch Call to Action to tackle terrorist use of the internet, which world leaders signed up to at a summit in Paris in May.