THE Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has joined the Christchurch Call which seeks to eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online, adding its support to an international coalition of stakeholders.

The Christchurch Call is a commitment by 55 governments and 10 technology companies to combat extremist content online, put in place after the March 15, 2019 incident in the New Zealand city of Christchurch where 51 people were killed in mosque attacks that were livestreamed on social media.

Since hosting the 2019 meeting that resulted in the Christchurch Call, the OECD has been driving a multi-stakeholder process to standardise how online platforms publish information about the Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content (TVEC).

"Both companies and countries are struggling to find ways to combat this while protecting fundamental freedoms and human rights," said OECD Secretary-General Mr Angel Gurria. "Joining the Christchurch Call and continuing to advance our work in this area is what the OECD is all about: like-minded governments, in consultation with experts from business, civil society and academia, collaborating to improve the evidence base and help to build better policies for better lives."

By formally joining the Christchurch Call, the OECD can collaborate more closely with the Call Community, adding its voice to underscore the imperative of collective action and ensuring that OECD outputs will be used most effectively to drive forward the Christchurch Call's objectives.

A 2020 OECD report on the approaches to TVEC online taken by the world's top 50 online platforms highlighted the need for more, and more consistent, reporting. Only five platforms were issuing transparency reports on TVEC and among them, there were substantial differences on how and what was reported.

"The dearth of reports, and the lack of comparability among them, are critical barriers to assessing the industry's efforts to counter terrorist and violent extremist content online and their impact on fundamental freedoms," noted the Paris-based organisation.

The OECD is working to develop a standardised reporting template for TVEC to aggregate and compare reported information across platforms, while helping to address the inefficiency of regulatory fragmentation.