Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter on Monday announced they had joined forces in an attempt to curb explicit terrorist imagery online.

Facebook、谷歌(Google)、微软(Microsoft)和Twitter周一宣布，它们已联手努力遏制网上带有明显恐怖主义色彩的图像。

The move follows criticism from Brussels that big US social media groups have made insufficient effort to clamp down on hate speech.

此前，欧盟曾批评美国几大社交媒体公司在遏制仇恨言论方面不够努力。

In a statement, the technology groups said they were building new technology that would identify extremist content, including terrorist recruitment videos and images of executions, via a digital fingerprint known as a “hash”, which would then be compiled into a shared global database. Once created, the hash would be attached like a watermark to content, which would then be easy to identify and take down.

这些科技公司在一份声明中表示，它们正在打造新技术，通过一种名为“散列”(hash)的数字指纹来识别极端主义内容，包括恐怖分子招募视频和处决图片，这些数字指纹将被汇集至一个共享的全球数据库。散列一经创建，将像水印一样附着在内容上，令这些内容易于被识别和删除。

“Our companies will begin sharing hashes of the most extreme and egregious terrorist images and videos we have removed from our services,” the companies said. “By sharing this information with each other, we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on our respective hosted consumer platforms.”

这些公司称：“我们将开始共享已从我们的服务中删除的那些最极端、最恶劣的恐怖主义图片和视频的散列。通过彼此分享这一信息，我们可以利用共享的散列来帮助识别我们各自的托管消费者平台上的潜在恐怖主义内容。”

The project will be presented at the EU Internet Forum on Thursday, with the database launching in early 2017.

该计划将于周四在欧盟互联网论坛(EU Internet Forum)上公布，相关数据库将于2017年初推出。

Facebook and Twitter insist the new hash database will not act as a generalised censorship tool but instead assist human users in flagging the most egregious content.

Facebook和Twitter坚称，新的散列数据库不会被用作泛泛的审查工具，而是用来帮助人类用户标识最恶劣的内容。