We are happy to announce that Imagga is taking part in a consortium working on the critical topics concerning democracy – identifying radical content online and creating an integrated situational awareness system to counter violent terrorism and enable crime prediction.
The CounteR solution, an open platform for analysis and early alert, will be launched under the project. The platform will collect and analyze data from dispersed sources in order to predict critical communities at risk of radicalization and violent extremism and aid law enforcement to detect radicalization.
Radicalization is one of the significant challenges online for societies in Europe and beyond. It’s easier than before for people to be misinformed or exposed online to extreme social, religious, or political ideas. Especially vulnerable are some groups with unmet psychological needs for belonging, status, or such with mental illness. The ease of communication and reaching out to multitudes of possible prospects via social media platforms make this threat imminent. Terrorist groups that use social media for radicalization have mastered their tools – it is getting harder to detect such efforts due to the complexity and mass spread of such problematic content. Early detection and flagging problematic content might be one of the most essential tasks in safeguarding Europe and its democratic societies. A combined effort in adopting anti-radicalization policies, technologies, and tools is becoming super important in the fight to counter violent extremism online.
To address this imminent problem, the CountR consortium will work on a platform that will combine critical technologies and know-how to make it possible for real-time detection of propaganda and radicalization in user-generated content. The various participating partner technologies will achieve the robustness of the detection methods. Imagga will contribute to our advanced image and video image analysis and efficient live-stream Content Moderation, which, combined and cross-referred with text analysis, will make it possible to detect radical messaging even though each media type might not have that particular message.
Imagga’s contribution to the CounteR project is the development of instruments and deep learning algorithms to analyze images used for the automatic detection of radicalization and extremist content. Imagga’s image recognition expertise and proprietary technology for Content Moderation will be used to build robust mechanisms for detecting problematic content. This includes detecting specific keywords, a scene in an image or an action in a video that might be related to or inclined to radicalization.