Hosted within the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS) at King’s College London through the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), with the support of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), READ provides secure, safe, and easy access to a comprehensive library of materials.

How it Works

READ is composed of materials categorized into four main categories: Far right/Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism (IMVE), Manifestos, Nazi material, and Nihilistic Violent Extremist (NVE) materials. In total, the repository now houses more than 2,200 unique documents, including manifestos, articles, essays, and magazines. The new platform features an improved search function, allowing users to search by specific subject matter which capture ideological streams like Neo-Fascism or White Supremacy as well as broader concepts like Gender or Geopolitics as they are captured within the documents.

The new READ platform also now streamlines the ability for researchers to submit documents to the repository and updates the process for submission approval. This improvement will play a critical role in helping the tool grow and expand to meet the needs of its users. Cited in academia, used in industry by regulators and tech platforms, and employed by law enforcement, READ is meant to provide cross-sector stakeholders with another resource in the broader mission of countering and preventing terrorism and violent extremism both on and offline.

GIFCT Member Access

READ has also partnered with GIFCT to provide members with access to additional supplementary research resources, an exclusive benefit that is part of the larger suite of technical solutions, tools, and resources available to GIFCT member companies designed to empower their trust and safety efforts. 

GIFCT members can now access the documents housed in READ via Compass, GIFCT’s member portal, allowing for a centralized location for all member resources, including bespoke knowledge products, intel bulletins, guidebooks, and a Wiki of IRF-activation events and actors. It also houses member policy information and key documents, creating a single, streamlined place for everything members need.

Learn More 

READ is available to anyone working on issues related to radicalisation, violent extremism, and terrorism, including researchers, practitioners, tech platforms and beyond. To learn more about READ, and to apply for access, visit here. 

READ is a project supported by GNET, which brings together an international consortium of leading academic institutions and experts to provide GIFCT members and partners with research and analysis on emerging threats and trends, including ongoing crises and conflicts while connecting them to a global network of experts and scholars. To learn more about GNET, and opportunities to contribute, visit its website.

Become A GIFCT Member

Are you a tech company interested in strengthening your capacity to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online?

Apply for membership and meet with GIFCT’s Membership Advisory Program (MAP), which supports prospective member companies as they work towards full membership, as well as current GIFCT members in ensuring continued alignment with our membership criteria.

GIFCT’s membership spans the full spectrum of the tech stack – including social media, e-commerce, travel marketplaces, file sharing, financial services, and more – demonstrating that no matter your digital service or platform, GIFCT welcomes your engagement and invites you to join its community. To learn more, visit www.gifct.org.

GIFCT Working Groups were launched in 2020 to facilitate multistakeholder dialogue, foster understanding, and produce outputs to directly support the GIFCT mission of preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. Each year, the Working Groups deliver guidance and solutions to industry, government, and subject-matter experts. The selected annual themes reflect trends in the terrorist and violent extremist threat landscape and the needs and priorities of the tech sector, and inform GIFCT programming and activities. 

Investigators Community of Practice

GIFCT’s Investigators Community of Practice brought together a network of investigation, analytic, incident response, and operational trust and safety (T&S) professionals from GIFCT member companies to learn from one another, brainstorm new solutions, and discuss emerging trends. This group periodically leveraged external experts to provide substantive briefings. The group produced new information sharing solutions, including the members’ portal, Compass, aimed at better organizing expert resources and contextual information for members, and an updated Information Sharing Non-Disclosure Agreement (ISNDA), increasing the capabilities of investigators in line with legal and policy frameworks to counter terrorist and violent extremist (TVE) activity while ensuring human rights are upheld. For a summary of the ICOP sessions, details of key outcomes, and a forward look, please see our dedicated blogpost.

Artificial Intelligence Working Group

As technologies continue to evolve, so does TVE experimentation and exploitation of new products. GIFCT brought together a diverse range of participants to map how TVE actors currently exploit Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies across the spectrum of recruitment, radicalization, and mobilization to violence. The Working Group built on the themes of GIFCT’s report “Artificial Intelligence: Threats, Opportunities, and Policy Frameworks for Countering VNSAs” from early 2025.

The group also consolidated and identified best practices and standards for AI safety products. Based on this mapping, the group presented potential ways forward in countering TVE exploitation of AI technologies. Insights and recommendations from this Working Group were outlined in the output report: “Artificial Intelligence: Threats and Opportunities.”

Addressing Youth Radicalization and Mobilization Working Group

TVE exploitation of young people is not a new phenomenon, but the ways in which young people are targeted and exploited online have become a central focus across counterterrorism and harm prevention frameworks in recent years. Groups like Al-Qaida and ISIS have historically exploited children, but emerging technologies and the volume and speed of technological change have raised widespread concerns about the implications for youth. This Working Group brought together tech company representatives working on safety and positive-intervention tools, alongside policymakers and practitioners, many of whom are managing youth resilience or intervention programs. The group produced three outputs facilitated by thematic sessions focused on mapping trends and good practices, deepening multistakeholder understanding of adversarial shifts in youth radicalization and mobilization, and identifying tools and solutions to support the development and delivery of effective interventions online.

Themes highlighted by the Working Group informed an Anthology of Trends and Insights, produced by GIFCT’s academic arm, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology, complete with additional research, framing, and an annotated bibliography. The issue of nihilistic violent extremism (NVE) emerged as a key focus for the group, generating widespread concern about the cross-platform harms and implications online. This resulted in a policy paper, Beyond Extremism: Platform Responses to Online Subcultures of Nihilistic Violence, written by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which provides an overview of the specific online threat landscape of nihilistic violence subcultures and outlines the implications for platform measures to protect users.

GIFCT, in partnership with Mythos Labs, was pleased to deliver an overhaul and update of GIFCT’s Campaign Toolkit, providing resources and guidance in five different languages for individuals and organizations looking to take action against terrorism and violent extremism online. The website is designed to be a one-stop shop for resources and tools to help activists of any type make a difference, regardless of their level of expertise. The Working Group brought forward new resources and support links to add to the toolkit, and updated the site with a youth-specific section to guide safety practitioners working with younger audiences online.

Working Group Launch Event

On February 18, 2026, GIFCT was pleased to host a virtual gathering to highlight the impacts and outcomes of the 2025 Working Groups, further connecting subject-matter experts, practitioners, and the tech sector. The webinar focused on some key findings and recommendations and helped ensure that GIFCT’s work and tools continue to reflect the evolving threat environment, member needs, and global lessons learned. During the webinar, GIFCT also launched its 2026 Working Group themes and opened a call for applicants.

GIFCT Launches 2026 Working Groups

GIFCT’s Year 2026 Working Group themes will focus on issues highlighted by key stakeholders and members in light of evolving global trends and challenges. 

• Signals Community of Practice
• Gaming and Youth Working Group
• Countering the Financing of Terrorism Online 

When GIFCT’s Working Groups began in 2020, we ran monthly, hour-long sessions that included the entire cohort of each Working Group. Since then, based on participant feedback, we have transitioned to a model of less frequent sessions, typically tailored to specific research questions or themes or tied to specific outputs; each session will be composed of a selection of participants based on their expertise and interests. 

GIFCT aims to integrate our multistakeholder network within groups, with meetings held on a varying basis depending on the scope, themes, and needs of each group. Working Groups dubbed “Communities of Practice” typically focus more on tech practitioner-focused sessions and strategic dialogue with our multistakeholder cohort, whereas traditional Working Groups focus primarily on multistakeholder sessions. Some participants may also wish to lead on funded outputs attached to the group. 

Signals Community of Practice

This Community of Practice will bring together teams from GIFCT member companies and platforms working towards joining GIFCT (as part of GIFCT’s Membership Advisory Program) to develop a better understanding of threat detection and information sharing across platforms. This Working Group will build off the gaps identified in GIFCT’s 2025 Investigators Community of Practice.

Structured around three interconnected segments—audio content analysis, URL sharing protocols, and user journey mapping—SCOP will enable participants to discuss actual threat content and brainstorm how it informs their trust and safety approaches, moving beyond hashing to develop a shared understanding of threats while maintaining appropriate legal and ethical safeguards. SCOP is designed primarily for tech company technical teams, with select sessions open to external expert presentations and dialogue. The Community will combine GIFCT member expertise with human rights perspectives to strengthen protective capabilities while upholding fundamental safeguards. 

This Community of Practice will focus primarily on GIFCT member-focused sessions; multistakeholder participants will be invited to specific sessions where their expertise is most applicable.

Gaming and Youth Working Group

The aim of this Working Group will be to identify and scale best practices to prevent TVEs from exploiting online games, gaming-adjacent services, and the wider gaming community, particularly concerning younger audiences. This theme builds off of previous outputs and addresses gaps and recommendations raised by GIFCT’s 2024 Gaming Community of Practice and 2025 Addressing Youth Radicalization and Mobilization Working Group. 

This Working Group will invite GIFCT member companies and wider online gaming representatives, government representatives, and subject matter experts to collaborate, share knowledge, and identify best practices. The group will host both multistakeholder sessions and tech industry-specific sessions. Key topics of discussion will include how best to incorporate age-sensitivities in safety-by-design and platform set-up; best practices for encouraging in-game user reporting mechanisms; and identifying potential signals of TVE activity across online gaming spaces for increased signal sharing.

This Working Group will primarily convene a multistakeholder cohort and also allow for GIFCT member-focused sessions, to provide space for GIFCT members to collaborate.

Countering the Financing of Terrorism Online Working Group

This Working Group will bring together a multistakeholder cohort of international experts, practitioners, and industry representatives to consider the emerging threats and risk areas in terrorist financial activity online. This group will consider how modern TVE networks have exploited online outlets to further their financing and map where there are gaps in traditional counterterrorism strategies when applied to the online threat landscape. The group will analyze the various financial touchpoints across different platforms and payment types, such as marketplace, cryptocurrency pathways, funding campaigns, and traditional financial information shared on messaging platforms. Additionally, the group will explore areas of potential convergence between terrorist groups and criminal organizations, and their implications for managing online risks and threats, and may also consider the implications for the implementation of sanctions regimes, including the UN “1267” sanctions. The group will aim to map the threat and highlight lessons learned and good practices from across various sectors. The Working Group is designed to exchange knowledge between relevant tech platforms, practitioners, countering the financing of terrorism experts, human rights specialists, and researchers.

This Working Group will primarily convene a multistakeholder cohort and also allow for GIFCT member-focused sessions, to provide space for GIFCT members to collaborate.

In 2025, GIFCT launched the Investigators Community of Practice (ICOP), an evolution of GIFCT’s traditional Working Group structure focused on trust & safety (T&S) practitioners at member companies and featured periodic strategic engagement from key multistakeholder participants. The Community of Practice format was decided upon following positive feedback from GIFCT’s 2024 Gaming Community of Practice, which examined ways to improve gaming platform safety practices. Communities of Practice primarily aim to address challenges faced by member companies and explore potential GIFCT solutions. They also focus on closing knowledge gaps, which is supported by targeted engagement with select stakeholders.

Each ICOP session was structured to explore the challenges that GIFCT members face, and was guided by two questions:

1. Threat landscape: What are novel characteristics found in Terrorist and Violent Extremist (TVE) content online, and how do these characteristics present challenges to content moderation?  
2. GIFCT Solutions/ Information Sharing:  What resources are needed to enable digital platforms to make responsible decisions about TVE content, and what role does GIFCT play in the delivery of such solutions?

These guiding questions helped to inform the group’s direction throughout the course of its convenings. The findings that emerged from ICOP identified trends and opportunities in both the threat landscape and GIFCT’s technical solutions, tools, and resources. As the threat landscape continues to evolve, and as GIFCT continues to diversify its membership, creating adaptable solutions informed by industry feedback is critical to empowering the work of member T&S teams.

Sessions

Industry Engagement

Contrasting previous GIFCT efforts focused on scaled technical and policy framework solutions, ICOP took a more granular approach by exploring challenges and best practices of daily T&S work. Through members-only sessions, industry participants had a rare opportunity to get feedback and share lessons learned with peers. Some of these sessions included presentations about: 

• Investigating potential illegal activity
• Building investigative capacity 
• Investigating hybrid harms

Multistakeholder Engagement

Based on needs discovered through initial industry sessions, GIFCT scheduled multistakeholder engagements to impart expert knowledge to members and inform future solutions. These included: 

• Expert briefing on semiotics and aesthetics in TVE propaganda.
• Briefings and resource production on the overlap of TVE and child harms.
• Engagements with regional law enforcement entities to consolidate guidance for reporting imminent threats to life.

Key Findings

Threat Landscape

• Cross Platform: TVE actors continue to compartmentalize their activities across multiple platforms. This creates unique challenges for digital platforms: limiting visibility of the holistic threat picture. As an example, TVE actors might seek to coax potential victims of abuse or recruitment to different platforms, dividing signals that multiple platforms may use to detect harm.
• Hybrid Harms: TVE actors have increasingly engaged in harm activities which blur the lines of what is typically thought of as TVE. This includes actors expanding abuse into child harms or other criminal activities. This highlights a need for cross-harm coordination amongst safety teams on digital platforms.

GIFCT Solutions/ Information Sharing

• Non-Hashed Signal: To address the increasingly cross-platform nature of the threat landscape, ICOP found that GIFCT should continue seeking appropriate opportunities to facilitate non-hashed signal sharing. This additional sharing should be balanced with appropriate guardrails and done in consultation with a community of human-rights-oriented multistakeholder partners.
• Expertise Sharing: ICOP found that GIFCT should establish venues for member companies to share best practices with one another and facilitate opportunities for multistakeholder experts to lead discussions on their areas of expertise. This underscores the need for continued investment in research partnerships like GIFCT’s partnership with the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), and systems in place to ensure researcher findings are routed to the relevant stakeholders.

Impacts

GIFCT Compass

Building on key findings from both ICOP and the 2024 Hash Sharing Working Group, GIFCT has been developing a member portal, Compass. Compass gives members access to GIFCT’s suite of resources to support their T&S work, including bespoke knowledge products, intel bulletins, and guidebooks. Through Compass, GIFCT can organize resources produced internally and in partnership with our multistakeholders in a curated fashion. With Compass, GIFCT intends to continuously find ways to synthesize key findings and resources from expert researchers into formats that intuitively slot into existing member needs. This is intended to reduce friction and merge GIFCT’s existing suite of support into a more consolidated package. 

Updated ISNDA

Findings from ICOP were used to shape GIFCT’s new Information Sharing Non-Disclosure Agreement (ISNDA). GIFCT’s new ISNDA seeks to lay the groundwork for new information-sharing solutions to complement GIFCT’s hash-sharing work. GIFCT hopes to continue ICOP’s work through the development of additional information-sharing solutions in upcoming Working Groups and Communities of Practice.

Why This Matters

As threat actors evolve, GIFCT remains committed to supporting our growing 35+ member platform responses to be both effective and respectful of human rights. GIFCT Working Groups and Communities of Practice offer GIFCT members and its global multistakeholder community an opportunity to engage with and provide feedback on GIFCT’s work and themes at the intersection of technology and counterterrorism.

Join GIFCT

Are you a tech company interested in strengthening your capacity to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online?

Apply for membership and meet with GIFCT’s Membership Advisory Program (MAP), which supports prospective member companies as they work towards full membership, as well as current GIFCT members in ensuring continued alignment with our membership criteria.

MAP provides tech platforms with tailored support designed to meet each company’s unique needs and in alignment with their priorities, such as:

• crafting and revising their policies and/or community guidelines,
• helping improve their human rights commitments, and
• strengthening their commitments to transparency reporting.

GIFCT’s membership spans the full spectrum of the tech stack – including social media, e-commerce, travel marketplaces, file sharing, financial services, and more – demonstrating that no matter your digital service or platform, GIFCT welcomes your engagement and invites you to join its community. To learn more, visit www.gifct.org.

At 4:06 p.m. EST on December 17, 2025, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) concluded its Perpetrator Content Incident (PCI) in response to a violent extremist event in Moscow Oblast, Russia.

Following the conclusion of the PCI, GIFCT is issuing the following summary of actions related to this event.

At 8:32 a.m. EST on December 16, 2025, GIFCT activated the PCI within its Incident Response Framework (IRF) in response to a violent extremist event in Moscow Oblast, Russia, and took the following steps:

• Alerted all GIFCT members that the PCI had been activated. By this time, in line with our IRF, communications were already underway between GIFCT and its member companies to share situational awareness about the offline violence in order to prepare for the potential that the event met the criteria to activate the PCI.
• Continuously shared open-source information about the event and perpetrator, communicated with external subject matter experts when relevant.
• Enabled GIFCT members to share hashes of the perpetrator-produced content depicting the attack, in video and image form, as well as other relevant information through internal channels.
• Alerted the Russian government, as the impacted government in this event, and GIFCT’s Independent Advisory Committee that the PCI had been activated in response to the violent extremist event.

Simultaneously, individual GIFCT members engaged in platform-specific enforcement operations, identifying and reviewing content in line with their respective terms of service, including instances of the content shared in a range of contexts.

At 4:06 p.m. EST on December 17, 2025, GIFCT concluded the activated PCI based on the time passed since the conclusion of the offline violent event and feedback from members on the level of attempts to upload new versions of the violating content on member platforms. New hashes of the perpetrator-produced content may be added to GIFCT’s hash-sharing database as members identify and share them.

We can currently provide the following information from this event:

• Between when GIFCT activated the PCI at 8:32 a.m. EST on December 16, 2025, and its conclusion at 4:06 p.m. EST on December 17, 2025, members added approximately 6,681 visually distinct items to the GIFCT hash-sharing database.

After concluding the PCI, GIFCT will convene multi-stakeholder debriefs with our members and community to review the steps taken as part of the response and identify lessons and improvements to be made. This is an essential, final step in our operations when the PCI is activated.

Ongoing Work:

In order for GIFCT and its members to further refine and strengthen our efforts, we continue to test our protocols and mature our Incident Response Framework, including the PCI. This work is currently underway amongst GIFCT’s internal team, and informed by the recommendations set forth by the GIFCT Year 3 Incident Response Working Group.

The Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), the academic research network funded by GIFCT, contributes Insights in response to IRF activations and will continue to provide research from experts on issues and questions related to violent extremist behaviors and technologies.

First Published December 16, 2025, at 2:56 p.m. EST

At 8:32 a.m. EST on December 16, 2025, the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) activated a Perpetrator Content Incident (PCI) in response to a violent extremist event in Moscow Oblast, Russia.

The PCI was activated due to perpetrator-produced content from a violent extremist attack circulating online.

As a result, GIFCT members share relevant information for other members’ situational awareness about the event. Hashes corresponding to the perpetrator-produced content depicting the attack, in video and image form, qualify to be added to the GIFCT hash-sharing database. This enables other GIFCT members to identify whether the same content has been shared on their platforms and address it in accordance with their respective platform policies. 

For more information about GIFCT’s:

• Incident Response Framework that guides how GIFCT and its members respond to mass violent attacks and their online dimensions, see here: https://gifct.org/incident-response/
• Hash-sharing database, see here: https://gifct.org/hsdb/

GIFCT is working with members and partners to monitor developments and respond accordingly. We thank our stakeholders for their continued engagement, and our thoughts remain with the victims and affected communities.

We will provide further updates on this post.

Throughout 2025, GIFCT built on the previous year’s work to strengthen engagement with its global multistakeholder community, create a more inclusive and sustainable governance structure, and increase the value it offers to members. As new threats emerge and technologies evolve, GIFCT’s work will continue to be guided by industry innovations and solutions, cross-sector collaboration, stakeholder feedback, and the opportunities identified for improvement. Together with its members and partners, GIFCT remains dedicated to improving online safety for all.

Membership

New GIFCT Members

In 2025, GIFCT welcomed six new platforms—Anthropic, SoundCloud, Roblox, TikTok, GitHub, and 4D Hype. These new members strengthen GIFCT’s reach into key areas, including audio streaming, AI, gaming, and software development. These members continue to diversify GIFCT’s membership and provide it with access to greater industry learning and solutions while also reflecting the ever-changing threat landscape.

GIFCT Launches MAP

In 2025, GIFCT launched the in-house Membership Advisory Program (MAP), which supports current and prospective members and ensures continued alignment with our criteria and tailored support designed to meet each company’s unique needs, such as:

• crafting and revising their policies and/or community guidelines,
• helping improve their human rights commitments,
• and strengthening their commitments to transparency reporting.

The new MAP provides GIFCT members with more direct access to GIFCT’s technical solutions, tools, and resources, including tailored research from the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET).

Naureen Chowdhury Fink, GIFCT Executive Director

“2025 was a truly transformative year for GIFCT. The needs and feedback of our expanded member community shaped our goals and achievements, from the updated tools and resources to the thematic focus areas, informed by our active and engaged stakeholder community. Through our new in-house Membership Advisory Program, we have been in direct contact with several platforms exploring membership, and it is exciting to be able to offer them real-time support. The updated IRF, the new human rights trainings and learning modules, and our targeted GNET publications serve a growing membership of nearly 40 companies. However, adversaries continue to adapt, and with these tools in hand, we will also continue to work with our members and partners to evolve and ensure that GIFCT remains agile and effective in building a safer internet for all.” – Naureen Chowdhury Fink, GIFCT.

Signal Sharing

GIFCT Updates IRF

GIFCT recently updated its Incident Response Framework (IRF), the mechanism that helps member companies respond to online dimensions of offline violence. The updated version streamlines the process to offer a more flexible and nimble response for members. Developed in consultation with a wide variety of stakeholders across diverse regions and platforms, including an independent review of GIFCT’s incident response policies and a multistakeholder Working Group, the new IRF improves information sharing, communication, and tailored support, while increasing transparency and optimizing member engagement.

Compass Houses Member Resources

The members-only Compass portal now allows GIFCT members to access a full suite of resources designed to empower their trust and safety efforts. The comprehensive repository includes bespoke knowledge products, intel bulletins, guidebooks, and a Wiki of material relating to IRF-activation events and actors.

Reflections from GIFCT’s Operating Board

“The continued growth of GIFCT since its inception speaks to the critical importance of building a collaborative community committed to our shared mission. From the critical role of the hash-sharing database and the Incident Response Framework to the multistakeholder-informed findings of the Working Groups, GIFCT’s resources continue to provide tangible value, empowering its diverse member community to prevent terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital spaces.” – Leslie Miller, YouTube.

Research and Analysis

Global Network on Extremism and Technology

2025 saw GIFCT’s academic research arm, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET), housed at King’s College London, produce over 100 Insights, including research on artificial intelligence, terrorist financing, hard tech innovation, and youth radicalization and mobilization. In addition to these public outputs, GNET authors have supported GIFCT member companies by providing targeted resources in response to events or needs, and flagging potentially violative content for platform review.

In May, GNET convened its fifth annual conference, which brought together representatives from academia, civil society, industry, and government to examine the evolving relationship between terrorism, violent extremism, and technology.

Julien Bellaiche, GNET’s Research Director, presenting during the Fifth Annual GNET Conference

GIFCT Knowledge Products

GIFCT continues to foster thought leadership and knowledge development. To that end, GIFCT publications and events deliver actionable analysis and recommendations to ensure that members stay informed about terrorist threats and trends, as well as the violent extremist exploitation of digital platforms. In 2025, these outputs included a GIFCT webinar cohosted with the Tech Coalition on the intersections of TVE online content and child harms, a report on artificial intelligence and countering violent non-state actors produced in collaboration with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, and post-IRF activation intelligence bulletins for GIFCT member companies.

Multistakeholder Workshop on Countering Tech-Related Terrorism in West Africa

Knowledge Exchange and Collaboration

2025 Events and Partnerships

In 2025, GIFCT convened government officials, civil society, and industry representatives for a workshop focused on the intersections of tech, terrorism, and counterterrorism in West Africa at the International Institute for Criminal Justice and the Rule of Law (IIJ). Participants shared insights on regional threats and trends, and identified collaborative solutions and lessons learned to help prevent and counter terrorism and violent extremism online and across the continent.

In June, GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink and Assistant Secretary-General Natalia Gherman, Executive Director of the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), signed a Memorandum of Understanding, providing for close cooperation between CTED and GIFCT in technical areas set forth in UN Security Council resolutions on counterterrorism. GIFCT also partnered with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on a series of briefings highlighting the findings of the AI and non-state actors policy paper.

Later in the year, GIFCT, in coordination with CTED,  cohosted an event on the margins of the 80th UN General Assembly to strengthen collective efforts to address the evolving ways in which terrorists and violent extremists target children and youth, both online and offline. GIFCT also cohosted a roundtable with Public Safety Canada (PSC) and CTED to foster an exchange of insights, lessons learned, and good practices from diverse fields, including safeguarding children online, trust and safety, counterterrorism, and the protection of children in armed conflict.

The year concluded with GIFCT’s Annual Member Forum, hosted in partnership with its Operating Board Chair, YouTube, for a day of sharing insights, collaboration, and forward planning.

2025 Working groups

Working Groups aim to further GIFCT’s mission by providing a space for understanding and expertise, thereby growing GIFCT’s capacity to support member companies and counterterrorism and counter-extremism practitioners. These groups each bring together experts from diverse stakeholder groups, geographies, and disciplines to offer advice on critical themes related to countering terrorism and violent extremism online and deliver on targeted substantive projects.

GIFCT’s 2025 Working Groups convened 178 participants from 40 countries across six continents to focus on three themes: Investigators Community of Practice; Artificial Intelligence: Threats and Opportunities; and Addressing Youth Radicalization and Mobilization. Related Working Group outputs will be available in early 2026.

Countering New Threats With Cross-Sector Solutions panel alongside the opening of the 80th UN General Assembly Session

“GIFCT plays a critical role as a convener of tech, government, and civil society, which is essential to building safer online spaces, resilient to terrorists and violent extremists. As Chair of the Independent Advisory Committee, we want to empower GIFCT to fully leverage the collective capacity of all its members. GIFCT’s greatest opportunity is to be a framework that can enable innovation in preventing and countering harm, empowering its members to develop approaches that keep pace with the ever-evolving threat landscape.” Jonathan Russell, Violence Prevention Network and Chair of GIFCT’s Independent Advisory Committee.

Governance

New IAC Chair and Members

Earlier this year, GIFCT welcomed the appointment of Jonathan Russell as the new Chair of the Independent Advisory Committee (IAC). Formerly serving as IAC Vice-Chair, Jonathan Russell is the International Director at Violence Prevention Network and brings over a decade of experience in counterterrorism, civil society, and tech. The IAC is composed of representatives from civil society and government and offers advice and recommendations on GIFCT’s strategic goals and activities. In addition to Rusell’s appointment, GIFCT is pleased to welcome new IAC members, whose expertise and perspectives will further enrich the committee’s role in guiding GIFCT’s mission.

GIFCT would also like to express its deep appreciation to the previous IAC Chair, Ghayda Hassan, for providing leadership and coordinating the IAC over the past three years, and to the outgoing IAC members for their support of and engagement with GIFCT.

New Operating Board Members

Following the 2025 Annual Member Forum, GIFCT is pleased to welcome Discord and Twitch as newly elected members of its Operating Board for 2026. Their appointments reflect the confidence of the broader GIFCT membership in the expertise, experience, and commitment both companies bring to the shared goal of preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms.

As GIFCT’s membership continues to grow, Discord and Twitch’s leadership will help ensure that the diversity of GIFCT’s expanded member community is reflected in the strategic guidance and decisions made by the Board. The appointment of these new board members shows GIFCT’s continued effort to shape its governance in ways that better serve its members and support sustainable planning in a constantly changing threat environment.

Human Rights

New Resources

GIFCT, in partnership with BSR, delivered a series of human rights training modules for member companies and prospective members throughout 2025. Additionally, GIFCT published a Training Modules Booklet containing practical tools and lessons, which equip companies with shared language, practical tools, and concrete next steps so that interventions are targeted, proportionate, and transparent.

The recent expansion of the Operating Board also reflects GIFCT’s commitment to strengthening its human rights framework. After seeking global stakeholder input, GIFCT published a Human Rights Impact Assessment that set guidelines grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. One key recommendation was to expand the Board beyond the four founding members, a step GIFCT has now put into practice.

Looking Ahead

Looking forward to 2026, GIFCT remains focused on strengthening its efforts to deliver on its mission of preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital platforms. In mid-2024, its Operating Board adopted the 2025–2027 Strategic Plan developed by GIFCT, with input from the IAC, to support and strengthen its community and enhance the capacity and capability of the tech industry and its partners. The year ahead will mark a period of strategic growth, operational enhancements, global engagement, and deeper industry collaboration.

As GIFCT’s membership continues to grow, Discord and Twitch’s leadership will help ensure that the diversity of GIFCT’s expanded member community is reflected in the strategic guidance and decisions made by the Board. The appointment of these new board members shows GIFCT’s continued effort to shape its governance in ways that better serve its members and support sustainable planning in a constantly changing threat environment.

“Welcoming Discord and Twitch to the Operating Board marks an important step in GIFCT’s evolution. We have grown from a small group of key founding members to a community of more than 35 companies working across the tech landscape. Discord and Twitch both bring incredible experience and industry insight that will support our multistakeholder community.” – GIFCT Executive Director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink.

Increasing the Operating Board’s expertise and representation also reflects GIFCT’s commitment to strengthening its human rights framework. After seeking global stakeholder input, GIFCT published a Human Rights Impact Assessment that set guidelines grounded in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. One key recommendation was to expand the Board beyond the four founding members, echoing the advice of the Independent Advisory Committee. Reflecting these, the Board in 2024 updated the governance structure, paving the way for more flexible and inclusive pathways to Board membership.

Effective strategies to address evolving terrorist threats require cross-sector and cross-platform collaboration, informed by global trends and dynamics. GIFCT remains focused on bringing together governments, civil society, and technology companies to develop practical solutions that prevent the exploitation of digital spaces. We are grateful for the engagement of Discord and Twitch, and we look forward to working with both organizations in the year ahead.

This event was held strictly under the Chatham House Rule.

Welcome Remarks and Fireside Chat

The opening fireside chat brought together GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink, Operating Board Chair and Vice President of Government Affairs and Public Policy at YouTube, Leslie Miller, and IAC Chair, Jonathan Russell, to take stock of a year defined by transformation and growth. 2025 has been marked by the expansion of tools, partnerships, and vision that have solidified GIFCT’s member-centric approach and strengthened its impact across a growing network of 39 companies. With six new members this year, a revised Incident Response Framework (IRF), the new in-house Membership Advisory Program, and new human rights training resources, GIFCT enters 2026 with renewed purpose and a furthered commitment to serve its member community. GIFCT has evolved into an increasingly independent organization now taking proactive steps to address the challenges posed by an ever-evolving threat landscape. As online and offline harms continue to converge, signal sharing, behavior-based prevention, and stronger multistakeholder collaboration remain essential to preventing terrorists and violent extremists from exploiting digital spaces. Engagement across industry, civil society, and government, including through the Independent Advisory Committee, helps ensure GIFCT’s work is grounded in diverse expertise.

GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink

Board Updates and Elections

Following the fireside chat, the focus turned to governance and the ongoing evolution of GIFCT’s Operating Board. The session offered GIFCT members a window into how the Board offers GIFCT strategic advice and direction, and informs its activities—balancing oversight with the collaborative approach that defines the organization. Updates to the governance structure in 2024 highlighted the Board’s recognition of the importance of maintaining a diverse and engaged leadership structure. Board members were invited to share their perspectives on the Board’s role and journey, and reflect on the opportunities for general members to stand for election to the Board. Operating Board members reaffirmed that collaboration remains at the core of GIFCT’s mission, noting how multistakeholder engagement has strengthened initiatives like the IRF and enhanced the organization’s global reach through high-level engagements, including this year’s UN General Assembly side event and workshops in several regions.

Following remarks from the Operating Board, two GIFCT member companies stepped forward to stand for elections, outlining their priorities and expressing commitment to strengthening member collaboration and continuing to advance responsible approaches to trust and safety. The outcomes of the election will be announced following the conclusion of the voting process.

Reflections from GIFCT’s Operating Board

Compass Preview

Reflecting member and stakeholder feedback, GIFCT has developed an internal portal for industry members to centralize and streamline access to key resources; it is anticipated to go live before the end of the year. Compass, the new portal, was presented to the membership by Skip Gilmour, GIFCT’s Director of Trust and Safety Solutions. It will serve as a secure hub for bespoke knowledge products, intel bulletins, guidebooks, and a Wiki of IRF-activation events and actors—all tailored to support GIFCT members. The presentation demonstrated key features of the interface, which will also include links to related resources, as well as integrated intelligence and analysis sections featuring Insights and reports from GIFCT’s academic research arm, the Global Network on Extremism and Technology (GNET).

The platform has been built not only to host information, but to evolve with member input—inviting companies to propose new features, contribute resources, and help shape the next generation of shared tools.

Threat Landscape Panel

Overview of the Threat Landscape

The next session turned attention to the rapidly evolving threat landscape and the implications for GIFCT member companies. Moderated by Dr. Erin Saltman, GIFCT’s Senior Director for Membership and Programs, the discussion brought together representatives from Anthropic, Dropbox, and the IAC to share industry and stakeholder perspectives on trends and solutions, including potential priorities for the forthcoming year.

Emerging trends, as highlighted by speakers, include acceleration in the radicalization of young people, with cases appearing at increasingly younger ages and within shorter timeframes compared to previous iterations of terrorist threats—sometimes unfolding over mere weeks rather than months or years. Relatedly, there has been a rise of subcultures fixated on extreme violence and gore, martyrdom narratives, and the glorification of perpetrators, often detached from coherent ideological narratives and targeting youth through “gamified” aesthetics and approaches. This “post-ideological” fascination with destruction, warned some speakers, presents new challenges for detection and intervention and creates uncertainty among governments about how best to adapt existing frameworks to these shifting dynamics.

The advancement of AI continues to pose both risk and opportunity for trust and safety efforts, some panelists highlighted. The same technologies enabling creative and productive use cases can also be misused by bad actors operating in fragmented or private spaces. The low barrier to entry and speed of model improvement have heightened concerns around emerging misuse, so the need for safeguards and friction—e.g., embedding safety measures during model training and maintaining ongoing monitoring after deployment—while also exploring ways to identify early risk factors, need to be holistically applied for optimal impact.

The discussion closed on a note of cautious optimism. Members were appreciative of this year’s Working Group themes speaking to the ongoing and evolving threat landscape that analyzed AI threats and opportunities, youth radicalization, and investigation practices. As participants looked ahead to 2026, they underscored the importance of collaboration, shared intelligence, and innovation in adapting to a threat landscape that is not only evolving—but accelerating.

Tech-Stack Specific Breakout Discussions

Tech-Stack Specific Feedback Session

Following the threat landscape panel, participants engaged in tech-stack specific breakout discussions tailored to the unique architectures and operational challenges of different platform types. These sessions provided a semi-structured forum for members to identify shared needs, exchange practical insights, and inform GIFCT’s future priorities across its Working Groups, research agenda, and member support initiatives.

Audio

Participants discussed potential applications of a shared dataset of identified terrorist audio files—from sharing audio related signals as a part of GIFCT’s broader suite of collaborative solutions to using the data as seed content for developing classifiers. The conversation underscored the importance of detecting contextual signals such as lyrics, podcast content, speeches, or the reuse of audio from violent incidents. Members also highlighted the need for improved language coverage, keyword-based detection methods, and streamlined signal sharing.

Gaming

The gaming group focused its attention on the complex and highly networked nature of violent extremist activity in gaming environments. Participants noted that exploitation in these spaces often forms part of a broader cross-platform strategy, making it essential to better understand how behaviors and users move between services. The discussion emphasized the value of shared resources and case studies to inform and improve future trust and safety efforts.

Fintech/Marketplace

In the financial technologies (or “fintech”) breakout group, members focused on the distinct challenges of detecting and disrupting terrorist financing through digital payment and fundraising platforms. Given the limited visibility into user behaviors compared to traditional content environments, participants stressed the need for cross-platform and sector partnerships and the importance of clearly defined guidance as it relates to signal sharing in this space.

URL Sharing

The URL sharing discussion addressed one of the most persistent and cross-cutting challenges in online safety—the use of links to evade moderation and sustain extremist networks across platforms. Members offered feedback on an upcoming pilot project, sharing insights on governance, safeguards, and interoperability. The project aims to strengthen collaboration between trust and safety teams so they can more effectively disrupt cross-platform dissemination tactics.

TTX Exercise + IRF Updates

The afternoon continued with an interactive tabletop exercise session focused on GIFCT’s recently updated IRF. Facilitated by GIFCT’s Trust and Safety Solutions Team in partnership with Extremisphere, the session combined a refresher on the newly enhanced IRF structure with a hands-on exercise designed to strengthen member readiness and cross-platform collaboration during live incident scenarios.

2025 GIFCT Annual Member Forum

Closing Remarks and Year Ahead

In closing, Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink reflected on a year of transformation and shared progress across GIFCT’s work in 2025. The threat landscape, she noted, continues to evolve at pace, which requires staying alert to emerging trends, shifting dynamics, and new opportunities for mitigation. As adversaries adapt, the need for strong cross platform collaboration has only become more pressing. She noted three key points that emerged across various sessions:

Constant evolution: The threat landscape is advancing rapidly, demanding sustained attention to emerging trends and mitigation opportunities. Continued adversarial adaptation reinforces the need for strong cross platform collaboration.

Youth: Rising concerns regarding the recruitment and mobilization of young people, alongside younger victim profiles, were widely noted. A deeper understanding of hybrid online subcultures and strengthened cross team coordination remains essential.

Focus on solutions: While clear threat definitions and consistent parameters are necessary, the priority is advancing practical, scalable solutions. Building on established lessons supports more effective and sustainable responses.

As GIFCT looks ahead to 2026, its commitment to transparency, innovation, and preventing the exploitation of digital platforms remains firm, grounded in the shared purpose of its expanding global community.

We thank our 2025 Operating Board Chair, YouTube, for hosting us, and our members and Independent Advisory Committee for joining this year’s forum to share critical insights and shape the year ahead.

Developing Prevention and Countering Radicalization to Violent Extremism Approaches for Youth Radicalization and Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online

PSC Executive Director Robert Burley, GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink, and CTED Director and Chief of Branch, David Scharia opened the event by setting the stage and stressing the importance of multistakeholder representation and the desire to apply the day’s learnings to actionable interventions. Offline and online dimensions are increasingly intertwined, and collaboration across sectors – government, civil society, and industry – is critical to building safer and more resilient online communities. Together, their remarks underscored the shared commitment to collaboration, knowledge exchange, and translating insights into concrete actions to better protect children from interconnected online and offline threats.

PSC Executive Director Robert Burley and GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink

Public Health Impact: Insights From Frontline Practitioners

The opening session, featuring Ghayda Hassan, Founder and Executive Director of the Canadian Practitioners Network for the Prevention of Extremist Violence and David O’Brien, Director of Mental Health Services at Yorktown Family Services, presented youth radicalization as an urgent public-health crisis, warning that children are being routinely exposed to harmful content online. The speakers warned that children as young as seven are spending many hours online and being targeted for recruitment by terrorist and violent extremist groups. Mental health challenges are often identified as contributing factors to increased vulnerability among youth with the confidentiality of many closed online spaces enabling discrete mobilization and targeting. Given the need to address multiple harm types that may converge, interventions are needed from a range of practitioners. A rapid and coordinated use of existing frameworks, stronger practitioner engagement with youth in digital spaces, and integrated prevention that treats radicalization as both a health and public safety urgency would be critical to strengthen mitigation efforts.

Lessons Learned: Preventing and Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism

The second session, moderated by CTED Chief of Section (Asia-Pacific and the Americas) Elizabeth Joyce, turned to lessons learned from prevention interventions and the outcomes of their work. Speakers from CIVIX, Moonshot, and Violence Prevention Network emphasized the importance of equipping youth to navigate complex online environments while connecting at-risk individuals to offline support. An example shared by CIVIX from Canadian schools demonstrated that digital literacy training can measurably improve students’ ability to identify false and misleading information and resist manipulative content. The speaker stressed that this skill must be cultivated as an ongoing habit rather than through one-time instruction.

Positive interventions offline and online, such as tech-based large-scale online engagement strategies, can identify vulnerable users in digital spaces and redirect them to life-saving services. Participants cited thousands of successful connections in Canada and the U.S. that link online behavior to tailored offline support. Moderation alone cannot address violent extremist behavior but technology companies are uniquely positioned to spot early warning signals. Digital interventions must be timely, credible, and closely tied to trusted service providers in local communities.

Tech Interventions: Addressing Youth Radicalization Online

Senior representatives from technology companies, including TikTok, Meta, Yahoo, and Roblox shared insights regarding industry approaches and solutions during a discussion moderated by GIFCT Executive Director Naureen Chowdhury Fink. While young people spend much of their time on digital platforms, these are often unfamiliar spaces for parents, educators, and practitioners, creating a disconnect in prevention efforts. To bridge that gap, speakers noted, companies are experimenting with new tools—from behavior-based messaging, custom interventions and search friction, to youth councils that give teenagers a direct voice in shaping safety policies.

Panelists acknowledged the limits of moderation alone, noting the important roles of civil society to strengthen prevention, redirection, and inform referral pathways that connect at-risk users to offline services. Shared playbooks, better metrics, and cross-platform collaboration could help to keep pace with fast-evolving violent extremist tactics. Collectively, industry representatives stressed the value of treating youth as partners in building safer online spaces.

Looking Ahead: Applying Findings and Taking Action

The closing discussion focused on translating insights into concrete action, with participants stressing that no single government, company, or organization can solve the problem alone, reiterating the need for stronger multistakeholder cooperation anchored in child rights and the rule of law. The interactive discussion highlighted key insights and recommendations for practitioners, policymakers and tech companies and stressed the importance of collaboration and partnerships with youth and civil society, including through continued support and education.
Prevention hinges not just on scale, but on speed. Delays in delivering meaningful online interventions can have real-world consequences. Stronger data sharing and evaluation, multistakeholder knowledge sharing and collaboration and an investment in youth are critical elements for successful strategies. For a comprehensive list of takeaways from the roundtable, see this resource from PSC.

Thematic Takeaways

GIFCT would like to thank Public Safety Canada and CTED for partnering on this event, and express our gratitude to participants who shared their expertise and insights.

Jonathan Russell

Formerly serving as IAC Vice-Chair, Russell is the International Director at Violence Prevention Network and brings over a decade of experience in counter-terrorism, civil society, and tech. His background includes previously working on terrorism prevention in Meta’s Safety Policy team, leading the countering violent extremism portfolio at a strategic communications agency, and sitting on the Steering Committee for the European Union’s Radicalisation Awareness Network.

“The scale of the challenges posed by terrorist and violent extremist use of the Internet: to radicalize, recruit, and operationalize is matched only by the speed of tech development. I am convinced that the best way to effectively counter and prevent violence online is for tech platforms to work together to build cross-industry solutions, and GIFCT is at the frontier of this.

As the new Chair of GIFCT’s Independent Advisory Committee, I see our role as ensuring that GIFCT fulfills its mandate effectively, safely, and transparently. With an excellent group of 20 experts, organizations, and governments we will bring a multistakeholder perspective to help it do so.” – Jonathan Russell, Violence Prevention Network and GIFCT IAC

GIFCT values its relationship with the IAC, which plays a vital role in promoting multistakeholder collaboration, providing strategic and substantive advice, and deepening understanding of terrorism, violent extremism, and their ongoing evolution.

“I am pleased to welcome Jonathan Russell as the new IAC Chair. His longstanding commitment to GIFCT’s mission and his broad experience in countering terrorism and violent extremism will be instrumental as we continue to enhance the impact of our work and improve how we serve our members. I look forward to working in close partnership with him as we advance our shared goals.”- Naureen Chowdhury Fink, GIFCT Executive Director

We look forward to continued collaboration and engagement with the IAC under Russell’s leadership and we are pleased to welcome new IAC members, whose expertise and perspectives will further enrich the committee’s role in guiding GIFCT’s mission. GIFCT would also like to express its deep appreciation to the previous IAC Chair, Ghayda Hassan for providing leadership and coordinating the IAC over the past three years, and to the outgoing IAC members for their support of and engagement with GIFCT.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), in partnership with BSR, delivered a series of human rights trainings for GIFCT member companies and prospective members throughout 2025 and published a Training Modules Booklet containing practical tools and lessons companies can use. The initiative brought together practitioners from industry and human-rights experts to translate human-rights norms into operational guidance for work on terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC).

Across multiple convenings, participants explored where human-rights obligations intersect with content moderation, product design, takedown and escalation processes, and preventative programming. Overall, the trainings showcased how clearer, rights-respecting processes improve decision-making, reduce harms to vulnerable groups, and strengthen transparency and accountability across platforms.

What’s in the Training Modules

The Training Modules Booklet packages three modular learning paths — each built to be practical, implementable, and easily integrated into company onboarding, policy refreshes, and cross-functional trainings.

1. Introduction to Human Rights

A video training introduces core concepts and why human rights matter for TVEC work. The module also includes a curated list of the most relevant rights in this context, a compact human-rights due diligence tool companies can use to map risk and mitigation, and a vulnerable-groups framework for assessing differential impacts. Information pertaining to the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs) and other foundational references is also included.

2. Human Rights Policy

The second module includes a video walkthrough on drafting and operationalizing human rights policies for tech companies, as well as links to GIFCT member human rights policies and benchmarks for comparison. Supporting resources, including GIFCT’s Human Rights Roadmap, our Human Rights Impact Assessment, and GIFCT’s Human Rights policy, are also listed for reference.

3. A Human-Rights Based Approach to Countering Terrorism and Violent Extremism

The third video training focuses on embedding rights into policies and product flows designed for counterterrorism operations. Additional resources in this module include reporting principles designed to protect users while ensuring responsiveness and redress, and the Human Rights cycle of a terrorist incident.

Why this matters

As threat actors evolve, GIFCT remains committed to supporting our growing 35+ member platform responses to be both effective and rights-respecting in line with human rights obligations. These trainings and the booklet equip companies with shared language, practical tools, and concrete next steps so that interventions are targeted, proportionate, and transparent — minimizing harm while maintaining safety.

GIFCT is grateful to BSR and to the companies and practitioners whose engagement made these trainings possible. The materials are solely for the use of GIFCT members and prospective members.

Become a GIFCT Member

Are you a tech company interested in strengthening your capacity to counter terrorist and violent extremist activity online and accessing GIFCT resources like this Human Rights Training?

Apply for membership and meet with GIFCT’s Membership Advisory Program (MAP), which supports prospective member companies as they work towards full membership, as well as current GIFCT members in ensuring continued alignment with our membership criteria.

MAP provides tech platforms with tailored support designed to meet each company’s unique needs and in alignment with their priorities, such as:

• crafting and revising their policies and/or community guidelines,
• helping improve their human rights commitments, and
• strengthening their commitments to transparency reporting.

GIFCT’s membership spans the full spectrum of the tech stack – including social media, e-commerce, travel marketplaces, file sharing, financial services, and more – demonstrating that no matter your digital service or platform, GIFCT welcomes your engagement and invites you to join its community. To learn more, visit www.gifct.org.