Six of the nine independent experts on the Global Internet Forum on Counter Terrorism's (GIFCT) Independent Advisory Committee resigned on Monday. The alliance is operated by several major U.S. tech companies, with Meta serving as the chair of the operational board this year.

The resignation letter stated that complaints regarding the restructuring plan were "ignored," and members have "lost confidence in GIFCT's effective fulfillment of its founding mission." In July, Nell McCarthy, Vice President of Content Policy at Meta, wrote to the committee, welcoming experts to provide insights on violent trends but no longer wishing for them to assess the effectiveness of large tech companies in curbing violence, and called for a "refresh" of the six-year-old Independent Advisory Committee. According to the new plan, new members will be selected by tech companies rather than elected by current members; the committee will no longer be able to collectively express opinions or make joint recommendations on key issues such as alliance performance. The resigning members wrote: An institution that cannot review, cannot take a stance, and cannot assess is not an advisory body, but merely a decoration and a performance of accountability.

GIFCT was initiated by tech companies in 2017, strengthened cross-platform hash sharing and incident response after the Christchurch mosque shooting in 2019, and established an Independent Advisory Committee in 2020. The operational board consists of founding members Meta, Microsoft, YouTube, and general members elected annually, with Discord and Twitch set to join as non-executive directors in 2026. The advisory committee includes representatives from civil society and government, chaired by Jonathan Russell of the Violence Prevention Network. External researchers have indicated that the restructuring will weaken oversight of the already questioned alliance. Meta holds additional influence on the board, but policy changes still require approval from other companies.

Previously, some advisors have stated they had "no real power," and some chose to exit quietly. The committee had previously recommended banning hash uploads without human review and indicated that having only four founding companies controlling the board was "unsustainable," advocating for activists and scholars to hold half of the seats. The founding mission is to prevent terrorist organizations from using online services, while actual governance power has always remained with the operational board providing the budget.

In market mechanisms, the buyers are platform alliances needing external legitimacy, and the sellers are independent experts providing counter-terrorism and speech research. The restructuring narrows the advisory output from "assessing platform effectiveness" to "providing threat intelligence," with funding and agendas still supplied by Meta, Microsoft, YouTube, and others on the operational board. The beneficiaries are platforms wishing to reduce public scoring, while the pressured parties are external overseers who have lost collective advisory rights. The event-driven factor is the rewriting of governance charters, not a new failure of the terror attack hash database.

Source: Public Information