India calls for global action to counter use of Internet for radicalization

NEW YORK: Responses to terrorism must be similar across geographies and cultures and differential standards must not be accepted, India has said, seeking global action to tackle the evolving threat of Internet being used by terrorists for radicalisation and terror financing.

Foreign Secretary S Jaishankar made the remarks during a high-level meeting at the UN on 'Preventing Terrorist Use of Internet' hosted by the UK and Italy on Wednesday."Internet backbone, critical Internet resources and data centres should be dispersed and redundant to mitigate impact of major terror attacks,” Jaishankar said, according to a transcripts released by the Permanent Mission of India to the United Nations on Friday."Responses to terrorism must be similar across geographies and cultures. This is an issue where differential standards must not be accepted,” he said.

In the presence of UK Prime Minister Theresa May, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italy's Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, leaders from industry and several countries met on the margins of the UN General Assembly to re-affirm their collective determination to prevent the Internet from being misused by terrorist groups and individuals.

"We have recognised the international nature of the online terrorist threat and the need to build global momentum to tackle it in a comprehensive way. We agreed to support the Forum, as well as existing regional initiatives in the sector of countering terrorism online, as they take vital steps towards this through their work to undertake research, share knowledge and develop technical solutions that will help their industry as a whole to protect their global user base,” it said.

As leaders of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube emphasised their shared ambition to prevent terrorists from exploiting the Internet to radicalise, recruit and spread propaganda, and to protect their users from terrorists and violent extremists online.

"They have committed to a range of platform-specific and Forum-wide efforts to better tackle terrorist abuse of open platforms, including exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate the identification of terrorist content; building on their hash sharing database of known terrorist content to help more companies to detect and prevent re-upload of that content; and other initiatives to support smaller companies build capabilities for tackling terrorist abuse of their platforms,” the statement said.