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Inside Two Years of Turmoil at Big Tech’s Counterterrorism Team


The four tech giants have led the alliance since they announced it in 2016, when Western governments criticized them for allowing Islamic State to post gruesome videos of journalists and humanitarians being beheaded. Now with eight employees, the GIFCT—the board of which was organized as a US non-profit organization in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre—is one of the groups in which the technological rivals have been created to work together to deal with the obvious harm on the Internet, including child abuse and illegality. close-up image trading.

Efforts have helped reduce objectionable content, and targeting activity can help companies avoid onerous regulations. But the politics involved in managing consortia often remain secret.

Only eight of GIFCT’s 25 member companies responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. Respondents, including Meta, Microsoft, and YouTube, all said they are proud to be part of what they view as an important group. The consortium’s executive director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink, did not dispute WIRED’s reporting. He says TikTok is still in the process of gaining membership.

GIFCT trust with voluntary contributions from its members to fund its approximately $4 million annual expenditure, which includes salaries, research, and travel. From 2020 to 2022, Microsoft, Google, and Meta each contributed a total of at least $4 million and Twitter $600,000, according to a publicly available filing. Some companies contributed tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but many paid nothing.

Last year, at least two board members were furious with companies they saw as freeloading, and fear spread among the nonprofit’s employees about whether their jobs were at risk. It didn’t help that since Musk turned Twitter into X about a year ago, he continued to cut costs, including stopping the company’s voluntary checks on GIFCT, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

In order to diversify funding, the board has signed off on requesting foundations and evaluating government grants for non-essential projects. “We will have to think carefully if it makes sense,” said Chowdhury Fink. “But sometimes working with multiple stakeholders helps.”

Rights activists the group spoke to privately questioned whether this would count as subsidies to tech giants, which could divert resources to potentially counter-extremism projects. But records show that staff were considering seeking funding of more than tens of thousands of dollars from the pro-Israel Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. Chowdhury Fink says the GIFCT didn’t just apply.

This year, Meta, YouTube, Microsoft, and X amended GIFCT’s bylaws to require annual contributions from all members starting in 2025, although Chowdhury Fink says an exemption is possible.

Paying members will be able to vote for two board seats, he said. The eligibility of the board depends on making the largest contribution. UX has signed that he won’t pay and will lose his seat, two sources said—a development that finally happened this month. It was planned to hold merger power between the board of four companies in 2025. (Under the bylaws, Meta, YouTube, and Microsoft could have kicked Twitter off the board as soon as Musk acquired the company. But they chose not to exercise this power.)



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