The four tech giants have led the consortium since it was announced in 2016, when Western governments sharply criticized it for allowing Islamic State to release gruesome videos of the beheadings of journalists and humanitarians. Currently employing eight people, GIFCT – which the board organized as a US non-profit in 2019 after the Christchurch massacre – is one of the groups through which technology competitors are expected to work together to address discrete harms online, including child abuse and illegal trade in intimate images.
These efforts have helped reduce unwanted content, and designating work can support companies avoid burdensome regulations. However, the politics surrounding consortium management generally remain secret.
Only eight of GIFCT’s 25 member companies responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. Respondents, who included Meta, Microsoft and YouTube, all said they were proud to be part of what they considered a valuable group. The consortium’s executive director, Naureen Chowdhury Fink, does not dispute WIRED’s reporting. He says TikTok remains in the membership process.
GIFCT relied on from its members’ voluntary contributions to fund the approximately $4 million it spends annually, which includes salaries, research and travel. From 2020 to 2022, Microsoft, Google and Meta contributed at least $4 million, and Twitter contributed $600,000. according to available public documents. Some other companies contributed tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, but most paid nothing.
By last year, at least two board members were furious with companies they perceived as freeloaders, and concerns had spread among nonprofit workers about whether their jobs were at risk. It didn’t support that when Musk turned Twitter into X about a year ago, he continued to cut costs, including suspending the company’s optional checks to GIFCT, according to two people with direct knowledge.
To diversify financing, the management board agreed to acquire foundations and even consider the possibility of obtaining government grants for projects unrelated to the core business. “We would really have to carefully consider whether it makes sense,” Chowdhury Fink says. “But sometimes it helps to work with multiple stakeholders.”
Human rights activists privately consulted questioned whether it would count as subsidies to tech giants that could siphon resources from potentially stronger anti-extremist projects. However, records show that employees considered applying for a grant of more than tens of thousands of dollars from the pro-Israel philanthropic foundation Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust. Chowdhury Fink says the GIFCT program was not ultimately implemented.
This year, Meta, YouTube, Microsoft and
Paying members will be able to vote for two seats on the board, he says. The condition for membership on the board is to make a larger donation. Two sources say that X signaled that he would not pay and would therefore resign from his mandate – which ultimately happened this month. It was planned that in 2025 he would have decisive power on the management boards of four companies. (Under Meta’s charter, YouTube and Microsoft could have kicked Twitter off the board immediately after Musk took over the company. But they chose not to do so.)