Fighting extremist content online: Feds dedicate $1.9M to terrorist analytic tool – National

The federal government is giving new funding to continue the development of an automated tool for finding and flagging terrorist content online.

In a press released issued Tuesday evening, the public safety department detailed a $1.9-million, three-year investment in funding “to combat online terrorist and violent extremist content.”

“We need to confront the rise of hate and violent extremism,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said in a tweet on Tuesday.

“At the Christchurch Call Summit, I announced that Canada will fund a new tool that helps small and medium-size online platforms better identify and counter content related to terrorism and violent extremism.”

The tool Trudeau referred to is the Terrorist Content Analytics Platform.

Created by the United Nations’ Tech Against Terrorism initiative in 2020, the tool combs various corners of the internet for terrorist content and flags it for tech companies around the world to review — and, if they choose to do so, remove.

The creation of this tool is funded by Public Safety Canada through the Community Resilience Fund. However, despite their funds supporting it, the government is at arms-length from the work TCAP does, according to the website for the tool.

Typically, terrorists share their content on “smaller platforms” first, according to Adam Hadley, who is the executive director of Tech Against Terrorism.

“Unfortunately, smaller platforms also tend to have limited capacity to handle terrorist use of their services,” he explained to Global News in an emailed statement.

“With the TCAP we are able to alert this content to smaller platforms quickly and thereby prevent the content spreading across the internet before it becomes viral.”

The TCAP starts with a team of open source intelligence (OSINT) analysts, who find out which platforms are preferred among terrorist entities. This team then identifies links to smaller terrorist-operated…