YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft establish working group to tackle terror content

New YORK - Major groups of social media including, Google's YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft have announced that they were establishing a global working group for making efforts jointly to remove terrorist content from their websites.

After pressure exerted by governments in Europe and the United States following a series of militant attacks, the organisations said they would extend technical assistance to each other for removing terrorist content, and sharing their commission research work more with experts of counter-terrorism.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism "will formalise and structure existing and future areas of collaboration between our companies and foster cooperation with smaller tech companies, civil society groups and academics, governments and supra-national bodies such as the EU and the UN," the companies said in a statement.

The current situation also highlighted the prospect of new legislation due to which only Germany in EU has proposed a law regarding imposing a fine of up to $56 million on social media websites on not removing hateful posts.

They tech firms will also share best practices to trace content using machine learning as well as define "standard transparency reporting methods for terrorist content removals."

Earlier this month, Facebook also spoke out about criticism from politicians on its efforts to remove the content.

Google also came forward with measures to trace and remove the terrorist or hateful content on its video-sharing platform YouTube.

In second half of 2016, Twitter suspended 376,890 accounts for promoting terrorism.