Facebook fulfilled a long-standing demand from policymakers and advocacy groups

Facebook fulfilled a long-standing demand from policymakers and advocacy groups this week when Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that a coalition of the country’s most powerful tech corporations will be formalizing its counterterrorism efforts into an independent organization with a dedicated staff.

In a public appearance alongside New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern on Monday, Sandberg announced that Facebook, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter will help form an organization tasked with confronting the deluge of violent and extremist content proliferating across their platforms.

Heidi Beirich, an extremism researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center, called the development “significant.”

“It shows an acknowledgement on the part of the tech sector that their platforms are contributing to radicalization and to terrorist propaganda and that I think there’s a willingness to take on that propaganda of all stripes,” Beirich told The Hill.

The announcement comes months after the Christchurch, New Zealand, mass shooting, which reignited governmental and public scrutiny of how tech companies handle violent and white supremacist content.

Now, as the companies face ramped-up criticism from regulators and lawmakers worldwide, they are expanding the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which they originally formed to deal with Islamic terrorism online in 2017. The founding members were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft.

For years, the GIFCT has mainly been an internal project centered around a database allowing companies to share digital fingerprints from terrorist or extremist content.

The companies say they will now be investing money and resources to create an independent GIFCT run by an executive director and a full-time staff. The organization will include an advisory board stacked with government officials and working groups, including input from academics, according to Facebook’s announcement.

Haroro Ingram, a senior research fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, told The Hill that he believes the new GIFCT is “good for optics” amid the furor over how the companies have handled right-wing extremist content.

“There is no question that the discussion [around terrorist content online] has improved,” Ingram said. “It’s getting more and more nuanced.”

But, he said, the recent announcement is “relatively superficial.”

“What will be interesting is how independent the GIFCT becomes … the extent to which it actually shapes practice,” he said.