CounteR – an Innovative Tool for Detecting Radical Content Online
Successful completion of the three-year CounteR Project, funded through Horizon 2020 – EU’s flagship research and innovation programme.
30 April 2024 marks the formal completion of the CounteR Project – Countering radicalisation for a safer world: privacy-first situational awareness platform for violent terrorism and crime prediction, counter radicalisation and citizen protection.
The project’s most significant achievement is the Counter Platform: an innovative early-warning tool to detect radical content online. Operational in 12 languages, the CounteR Platform can: perform proactive content monitoring across platforms and sited on the open, deep and dark webs; detect and moderate radical content, extremist ideologies and hate speech; and analyse text and images. The CounteR Platform helps law-enforcement agencies, internet providers and social media platforms identify threats and tackle radicalisation.
“Unlike tools that only focus on one form of extremism, CounteR detects content across a variety of radicalisation domains, including jihadism and extremist ideologies. This ensures a comprehensive and holistic approach to monitoring and combating radical content online. The Platform is definitely not the only project result. The multidisciplinary team of CounteR is also proud with the valuable research findings, produced within the project that helped tremendously for understanding the psychological and sociological dynamics of radicalisation”, CounteR’s project coordinator Catalin Trufin from Assist Sotware commented.
Building upon the valuable work conducted within the project, the consortium is committed to leveraging its results and continuing to develop and refine them into a tangible, final product. To ensure the sustainability of the project, proactive steps are being taken to secure additional funding, enabling the CounteR solution to progress to the next level.
To learn more about the project, follow CounteR on X and on LinkedIn; check the CounteR website, and the full set of project newsletters.
Published: 09.09.2021
on 1 May 2021, the 19 organisations from 11 EU Member States, including businesses, NGOs and industrial, research and academic centres, as well as six national law enforcement agencies in the field of justice, police and internal security, started a three-year project with funding from the European Commission's Horizon 2020 programme to support the fight against radicalisation and thus prevent further terrorist attacks. .
The main objective of the counter solution is to provide law enforcement and internet service providers and social media platforms with an early warning tool that can be used to identify potential radicalised content to prevent radicalisation and as a result prevent life-threatening terrorist attacks.
Radicalisation, fuelled by online and offline propaganda, has been a key driver of violent terrorism in almost every terrorist attack in Europe and around the world over the past decade.
This project will create a platform for analysis and early warning - a counter solution that will collect and analyze data from a variety of sources to predict risk groups where there is a threat of radicalisation and violent extremism, and help law enforcement agencies identify radicalisation processes much faster. . The objective of the system is to support the fight against organised crime (cybercrime) and terrorist threats, as well as to facilitate the exchange of information and cooperation between the various European institutions responsible for combating the radical propaganda of terrorism, the collection of funding, recruitment and planning of terrorist attacks. U.. During the counter project, a tool will be developed that will quickly and accurately identify and delete terrorism content online while maintaining privacy protection and anonymization of data. .
the "counter project aims to present an instrument to police officers that will assess the risks of radicalisation at the level of public groups so that law enforcement can identify radicalisation risks in a timely manner and thus apply prevention strategies more effectively. . The instruments developed so far were mainly intended to identify risks of radicalisation rather than to prevent them I.. Jennifer Woodart (chief executive of INSIKT Intelligence) says: “Counter will use online data tracking along with knowledge of cultural differences and socio-psychological knowledge.”
As part of the counter project, a tool will be developed for rapid and accurate online identification and deletion of terrorism content, while preserving privacy protection and anonymisation of data.
The system will collect data from dynamic sources such as social media and a wide range of offline open sources, combined with globally recognised expertise in radicalisation psychology. Information obtained by the system would allow law enforcement and other responsible authorities to use content contrary to extremist propaganda and manipulation instead of relying solely on surveillance.
Catalin Trufin (ASSIST software SRL's EU project manager) told that 'counter's solution will focus on “hotspots” of radicalisation in rather than evaluating specific individuals. . This is a key prerequisite for protecting citizens' privacy, as both policymakers and law enforcement agencies, which need to balance the important work they are doing with the need to comply with legal, regulatory and ethical frameworks, have been concerned about this issue for some time. "
Despite the efforts of the EU and European and international law enforcement agencies in recent years, radicalisation, particularly online, is harder to stop than ever, mainly in the context of the social challenges caused by THE COVID-19 pandemic.
The opening meeting of the project, which took place online on 19-20 May 2021, discussed cooperation mechanisms between 19 partners of the counter consortium, project deadlines, expected results, as well as other organisational issues related to the implementation of activities.
The counter project brings together an excellent international expert group on counter-terrorism, radicalisation and privacy law, six European law enforcement agencies with practical expertise, as well as a group of technical SMEs and academic partners.
For more information about the counter project, please visit https://counter-project.eu
FOR THE MEDIA:
Name: Catalin Trufin
Function: Project Coordinator
Organization: ASSIST software SRL
Contacts: catalin.trufin@assist.ro
Name: Borislavs Mavrov
Function: Head of information distribution
Organisation: European Institute Foundation
Contacts: office@europe.bg