In a bit to fight back against terrorism on the internet, Google has debuted a new free tool called Altitude, that aims to scourge the dusty corners of the internet and identify and act on threats that could prove dangerous in the real world. There are a lot of real world conflicts happening all around us, and conflict often breeds extremist content and misinformation. With the internet becoming smarter and more accessible, miscreants are using platforms online to spread extremist propaganda and misinformation that can cause a bias towards the wrong ideas. The Jigsaw team at Google, designed the Altitude tool to combat exactly this.
For those of you who do to know, Jigsaw is a dedicated team working at Google who have one job and one job only – Find and eliminate extremist content and misinformation, anywhere on the internet. They scourge places on the internet that we didn’t even know existed and when they spot something that can be a red flag, they immediately take action. With Altitude, they seek to make their task a bit faster and create a bigger impact in the same amount of time.
Working alongside Jigsaw, is ‘Tech Against Terrorism’, a division of the UN who perform a similar role to Jigsaw. They have pooled in their experience and know-how and assisted in the development of the Altitude tool. But how will it help?
Altitude is a free utility, which means, communities of all sizes can make use of this tool and empower their fight against misinformation. The more the merrier in this case. Extremist content is usually flagged using image hashes and the digital fingerprints are then used to narrow down and eliminate the violating content. But, if it’s a new tool, the dataset it has been trained on must be limited right?
No, in fact the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism – a group formed in 2017 by industry leading names such as YouTube, Microsoft, Facebook and X, have pooled in their datasets together to make Altitude a full fledged and ready to reply utility.
“Islamic State and other terrorist groups didn’t give up on the Internet just because they no longer had the megaphone of their social media platforms. They went elsewhere. They found this opportunity to host content on file-hosting sites or other websites, small and medium platforms.
“Those platforms were not welcoming terrorist content, but they were still hosting it – and actually, quite a lot of it”, said Yasmin Green, CEO of Jigsaw.
It will be interesting to see how communities make use of Altitude in their fight against Terrorism and Misinformation. Say tuned to this space for more.
