A Taxonomy for the Classification of Post-Organisational Violent Extremist & Terrorist Content

Authors: Jacob Davey, Milo Comerford, Jakob Guhl, Will Baldet, Chloe Colliver
Published: 9th December 2021

This briefing outlines a prototype taxonomy for classifying terrorist and violent extremist content. It proposes dividing this content into the categories of ‘inspirational material’, ‘ideological material’, and ‘instructional material’ along one axis, ‘violent’ and ‘non-violent’ on another, and ‘group’ and ‘non-group’ on a third.

It is designed to inform content moderation decisions made by social media platforms, including adjustments to the hash sharing database of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) which provides unique digital ‘fingerprints’ of known terrorist content which has been removed from social media platforms.

This briefing was originally funded by and produced for the GIFCT, and is reproduced by ISD with the GIFCT’s permission. It forms part of a broader series which is available on the GIFCT website.