File photo: Jacinda Ardern and Emmanuel Macron in 2021. Photo: AFP
Dame Jacinda Ardern's world-leading Christchurch Call, which aims to stop violent extremism online, has grown with new members but her co-chair French President Emmanuel Macron is criticising media giants Google and Meta after they failed to attend a group meeting on Friday.
Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) firms Anthropic and Open AI have joined the Call, alongside new online platforms Discord and Vimeo, seven new specialised partner organisations, and 11 new members of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, according to a statement released on Sunday.
But Meta - formerly known as Facebook - and Google didn't send representatives to its meeting on Friday in Paris. Macron, speaking to the BBC after the meeting, said it showed "they don't want to play anymore".
Facebook was responsible for facilitating a new level of horror during New Zealand's worst mass murder in modern history as the site where the March 15 gunman livestreamed his murders, and Dame Jacinda created the call in 2019 in the wake of the attacks.
At Friday's Summit, leaders remembered the victims and survivors of terror attacks around the world, including the 51 shuhada (martyrs) of Christchurch.
After the call, leaders also acknowledged the fear and pain caused by a surge of terrorist and violent extremist content from the Israel-Gaza crisis, as well as content inciting violence, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia. Call members pledged to update the crisis protocols in light of the heightened risk.
The Call's emergency response protocol was was used during the New Lynn terror attack and again during the Parliament occupation, when an alternative media outlet tried to share a foreign-made conspiracy video about the March 15 terror attack.
Leaders also discussed how to counter the risks of new technologies - such as generative AI - being manipulated and misused by bad actors. The Call Community will deploy its expertise to help identify and counterterrorist abuse of AI, the statement read.
It also pledged US$1.3m in new funding and technical support will help deliver the ambition to grow the Initiative into a global network for innovative research and understanding of AI.
The first tranche of funding for the project was announced in September last year in New York.
- This story was first published by Stuff