Members of GIFCT (the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism) believe the group’s standing is undermined by X’s membership and position on its board, according to a report in The Sunday Times. The GIFCT also includes key social media groups Microsoft, Facebook and Alphabet’s YouTube. X Corp and the GIFCT did not immediately respond to the demands for comment. Root cause of the concerns was content posted (on Elon Musk’s X) by Palestinian militant group Hamas.

The Sunday Times report quoting the Community Security Trust (CST), a charity that fights extremism and antisemitism, stated that X (formerly known as Twitter) is now perhaps the best social media platform to find Hamas videos. The report said that within 10 minutes CST researchers were able to access on X propaganda videos from UK government proscribed terrorist groups Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

The Sunday Times report states that a statement in the GIFCT’s independent advisory committee annual 2023 report articulating concern over online trust and safety was directed at X. The advisory body stated it had become “increasingly concerned by significant reductions in online trust and safety capabilities for certain platforms, and a perceived decrease in the priority of the issue, negatively impacting companies’ ability to moderate extremist content online”.

The Sunday Times stated that Musk had allowed banned extremists back on to X, let anybody to pay for a verification mark and fired a large part of its content moderation team, as part of the billionaire’s plan of turning X into a “free speech” platform. The Sunday Times stated that X despite being a founding member of the organisation, was now failing to make its full financial contribution to it.

GIFCT (the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism)

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism was created in 2017 under constant pressure from U.S. and European governments. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a staff of technology and counter-terrorism experts employed with member tech companies and stakeholders in academia, government, industry, and civil society to disrupt and prevent terrorist and violent extremist misuse of digital platforms.

Established in 2017 to address the misuse of social media platforms by terrorist organizations such as the ISIS, GIFCT’s founding members saw a far greater need for the tech industry to organize its collective capacity to render violent extremists and terrorists ineffectual online following the 2019 Christchurch terrorist attack in New Zealand. Currently, GIFCT operates as an independent NGO carrying out technological, programmatic, and strategic initiatives with contributions from its 25+ tech company members.