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‘Digital Chokehold’: Tool Developed by Tech Giants to Stop Terrorists Enables Mass Surveillance, Censorship

The Defender | September 24, 2025

Most people have no idea how far-reaching modern digital surveillance has become. In the wake of the Epstein scandal and the rise of the Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program, the public has largely accepted new monitoring tools as necessary to fight crimes against society’s most vulnerable.

That acceptance has allowed governments and Big Tech to quietly deploy one of the largest surveillance infrastructures in human history — an invisible, always-on monitoring system that watches nearly everything we send, store and share online.

PhotoDNA: Trojan horse for scanning everything 

At the heart of this infrastructure is PhotoDNA. Developed by Microsoft in 2009, PhotoDNA generates a digital fingerprint, or hash, for every image or video uploaded to participating platforms, which include Google, Meta, Apple, Dropbox, Twitter, Discord and many more.

These hashes are compared against a shared global database of known child sexual abuse material. If a match is found, the platform automatically flags, quarantines or reports the file.

The database is continuously updated and instantly synchronized across all partners, allowing near real-time takedowns.

This was sold to the public as a tool exclusively for catching predators. But the technology itself can’t discern the difference between illegal images and political speech. And over time, the scope of its use has quietly expanded.

From predators to ‘extremists’: enter GIFCT 

In 2017, tech giants — Meta, Microsoft, YouTube and Twitter (now X) — founded the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT). Publicly, its mission was noble: stop terrorists from using digital platforms to recruit, organize or spread propaganda.

Privately, however, GIFCT built something far more powerful — a centralized global database of “objectionable content” — modeled after PhotoDNA but repurposed for ideological policing.

Here’s how GIFCT works:

• When one partner flags content as “extremist” or “terrorist,” GIFCT generates a hash, a string of characters used to create a unique digital fingerprint for data (a file, photo or data) that can’t be decoded. A hash is obtained by running a mathematical formula over the data.
• That hash is instantly shared across all member platforms.
• Any matching content is blocked, throttled or erased in real time — often without informing the user.
• The flagged account may also be shadow-banned (hidden without the user’s knowledge), suspended or referred to law enforcement.

The system’s integration across multiple companies and platforms effectively bypasses borders, legal jurisdictions and constitutional protections. Once content enters the GIFCT database, it can vanish from the internet everywhere at once.

The silent redefining of ‘extremism’ 

GIFCT’s power becomes more troubling when we examine how “extremism” is defined.

In 2021, internal GIFCT documents revealed discussions about expanding its hash database beyond terrorism to include:

“Fringe groups [whose] non-violent ideologies … are on the periphery of social movements or larger organizations, with more extreme views than those of the majority.”  (“Broadening the GIFCT Hash-Sharing Database Taxonomy,” p.53)

This is a turning point. It moves GIFCT from targeting violent threats to monitoring dissenting ideas.

Civil rights groups, health freedom advocates, independent journalists, whistleblowers and reformers — anyone operating outside mainstream consensus — could now be flagged, throttled or silenced under GIFCT’s framework.

And because private companies make these decisions in closed-door sessions, there is:

• No public oversight.
• No appeal process.
• No democratic accountability.

The mechanisms of invisible control 

GIFCT’s technology operates quietly in the background, shaping information flows without most users realizing it:

• Shadow banning: content gets published but algorithmically suppressed, so almost no one sees it.
• Real-Time erasure: posts or videos vanish instantly across multiple platforms if hashed.
• Behavioral profiling: data about what you read, share and discuss can be tied to “risk profiles.”
• Proactive takedowns: artificial intelligence, or AI, now predicts “likely extremist content” before it’s even posted. What began as a fight against terrorism has evolved into an unprecedented capability for narrative control — one where Big Tech and government-backed nongovernmental organizations quietly manage what the world can see, share and believe.

The threat to civil rights and social reform 

Surveillance networks like GIFCT don’t just monitor — they shape activism itself. By algorithmically suppressing controversial, dissenting or reformist voices, these systems can:

• Preemptively neutralize protest movements before they organize.
• Silence journalists who challenge entrenched power.
• Marginalize minority political perspectives.
• Narrow public debate until only approved narratives remain visible.

This has profound consequences for democracy and civil liberties. History shows us that nearly every major social reform — civil rights, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ rights, antiwar movements — began as fringe positions.

If today’s automated surveillance systems had existed decades ago, many transformative reforms might never have gained visibility.

Without transparency and democratic oversight, GIFCT risks creating a digital chokehold on cultural evolution itself.

What must be done 

To preserve free speech, open debate and the possibility of reform:

• Congress must act to place limits on GIFCT’s scope and require full public transparency.
• Privacy and civil rights organizations must be empowered to audit GIFCT’s hash lists and review what’s being censored.
• Users must have due process rights — the ability to appeal labels, removals and bans.
• Citizens deserve public reporting on who decides what gets suppressed and why.

A choice between freedom and control 

The question is no longer whether you have “something to hide” but “who gets to decide what is hidden?”

What began as a narrowly focused child protection tool has grown into a globally integrated surveillance apparatus capable of monitoring nearly all speech, thought and dissent online.

If we fail to act, GIFCT and its partners will continue to quietly rewrite the boundaries of acceptable discourse — undermining civil rights movements, weakening reform efforts, and placing democratic freedoms in the hands of unelected private boards.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

September 25, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance | Human rights