Q&A with Erin Saltman of Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, backed by Facebook and others, on redefining extremism, working with members, and more
Issie Lapowsky / Protocol : Tweets: @protocol , @issielapowsky , and @issielapowsky Tweets: @protocol : Soon after the Jan. 6 riot, the tech industry's leading anti-terrorism alliance decided to expand its definition of terrorism. Today it released a 177-page report on the matter, and, well, a radical rethinking of online extremism it is not. https://www.protocol.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : If you're interested in the delicate balance between over censorship and checking rising extremism, there's a lot in here for you. Saltman also helped build Facebook's dangerous individuals and groups team. https://twitter.com/... Issie Lapowsky / @issielapowsky : NEW: Big tech's anti-terrorism group spent the last 5 months trying to expand their database of banned terrorist content. I had a fascinating convo with @ErinSaltman about that work and the incremental changes the @GIFCT_official is announcing today https://www.protocol.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism has spent four years as the tech industry's shared enforcement backbone — formed by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube in 2017 around a shared database of terrorist content, then extended internationally through the Christchurch Call commitments signed by those platforms plus Amazon. But Protocol's March reporting showed the alliance had let domestic extremism work lag behind its ISIS-era foreign-threat machinery, even as QAnon-style movements grew on member platforms.
This Q&A with Erin Saltman — who helped build Facebook's dangerous individuals and groups team before joining GIFCT — lands alongside the forum's first major response to that gap: a 177-page report redefining terrorism after Jan. 6, five months in the making. Lapowsky's framing is the story's edge: a radical rethinking of online extremism it is not, and the censorship-versus-radicalization balance is exactly where members will feel it.
First-order effects
- Member platforms must now fold the expanded definition into their moderation policies and the shared database, moving domestic extremist movements like the ones Protocol flagged in March into scope alongside legacy foreign-terror classifications.
- Saltman's dual pedigree — Facebook policy builder turned coalition lead — makes her the working interface between individual platform trust-and-safety teams and the collective standard they now share.
Second-order effects
- Companies outside the founding four face pressure to adopt GIFCT's definitions rather than write their own, since staying off the shared database means owning the reputational risk of hosting what the alliance now classifies as extremist.
- An incremental rather than radical redefinition keeps the over-censorship critique alive: civil-society critics who found the old foreign-terror scope too narrow will read the cautious rewrite as evidence the coalition moves only under public shock like Jan. 6.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, privately negotiated definitions like this one harden into de facto global speech standards — set by a handful of platforms and their coalition staff, updated on crisis cadence, with no regulator formally in the loop.
- The report also entrenches the split Protocol documented: coalitions built for organized foreign networks get institutional budgets, while diffuse domestic movements are handled through periodic definitional patches rather than standing systems.
The trend: Platform coalitions are quietly becoming the world's de facto arbiters of what counts as extremism, expanding from foreign-terrorism databases toward domestic movements one crisis-driven report at a time.