Telegram & Etidal pledge strong cooperation against terrorist content

Riyadh: Telegram and Saudi Arabia's Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology- Etidal- have pledged on Monday to reinforce cooperation to counter-terrorism and extremism, Arab News reported.

Both worked together for more than three years and reviewed extreme Arabic content online. They have pledged to become more active in removing content in Arabic that promotes terrorism.

Dr Mansour Al-Shammari, Etidal secretary-general, welcomed the move and said that it looks for cooperation as well as partnership in a professional mode by making use of its ideological, media and digital capabilities and wish to achieve its aims. Etidal is looking forward to more similar cooperation with other online platforms, he added.

Telegram responded that their partnership with Etidal was productive. Telegram supports free speech and expression but not the propagation of terrorist propaganda. It is improving its moderation tools to make the platform abuse-free, Telegram added.

Etidal had run a four-week research and assessment on thousands of suspected channels on terrorism online by detecting patterns of their operation and shared their inference with Telegram so that the latter could review extreme content.

The joined counteraction to terrorist content has mainly focused on the propagation of material by Daesh, Tahrir al-Sham and Al-Qaeda through their affiliated media. The content includes PDFs, videos and audio.

They claim that the Telegram-Etidal partnership had removed 672,972 pieces of content and links.