UK minister touts automated effort to combat extremism online

(Reuters) - Britain has partnered with a London-based firm to develop an algorithm that can identify terrorist content online with greater accuracy than anything previously known, Home Secretary Amber Rudd told tech leaders in Silicon Valley on Tuesday. "This is an incredibly exciting development which could help remove significant amount of the terrorist material we're referring to," Rudd told a forum in Palo Alto, California, that was broadcast on Facebook. She said Britain had teamed up with London-based ASI Data Science "to develop technology that can identify online terrorist content with a higher degree of accuracy than any other publicly known technology available." Rudd said she was keen for social media companies to adopt similar automated approaches to speed up the removal of terrorist content online. (Reporting by Lisa Lambert and David Alexander; Editing by Susan Thomas)