Dive Brief:

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have partnered to form the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism in recognition that the spread of terrorist content and violent extremist ideas via digital channels is an ongoing challenge for the tech giants, according to a Twitter blog post.
The Forum is designed to make the tech companies' hosted consumer services hostile to terrorists and builds on initiatives including the EU Internet Forum and the Shared Industry Hash Database. It also follows Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft signing a code of conduct created by the European Commission to combat the spread of hate speech last May — a move that was met with some derision from groups concerned about free speech, according to Fortune.
The blog post highlighted three areas of focus for the forum: technological solutions, research and knowledge sharing between the groups.

Dive Insight:
Terrorists have long made use of social media and digital platforms for recruitment and spreading messages of hate, and the forming of the new forum is perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the problem is now too large and far spread for any single tech giant to address alone. 

Beyond working toward a moral good, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube have a vested business interest in working harder to excise offensive or hateful content, along with the networks that support them, from their platforms. Recent controversies around the idea of brand safety might've spurred the initiative, and the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism could ease the growing concerns of marketers around where their ads appear online.

In late March, several large brands and organizations in the U.K. noticed their ads were running next to terrorism-supporting videos on YouTube, and the issue quickly picked up traction worldwide, with a number of advertisers boycotting the video platform and other Google properties in response. Twitter has also often been criticized for doing little to mitigate hate speech and harassment on its service, a problem compounded by often anonymous user profiles.