Though criticized for their delayed reaction, the coalition of tech giants known as GIFCT began working together to curb online terrorist content in late 2016. Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and Google announced the creation of a shared “hash database,” in which “digital fingerprints” of terrorist content are stored so that organizations might “identify such content on their services, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove matching content as appropriate.” The partnership behind database was formalized in June 2017 as the GIFCT, and grew to include other Internet platforms, such as Ask.fm, Cloudinary, Instagram, Justpaste.it, LinkedIn, Oath, Reddit, Snap, and Yellow. Since the initiative began, the companies added 100,000 hashes to the database. Using this information, Twitter permanently banned over 270,000 accounts in the initiative’s first six months, while over the course of 2018, Facebook removed over 14 million pieces of terrorist content.