(Reuters) - A consortium of tech companies including Facebook Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Twitter Inc said on Monday a database it created to identify extremist content now contains more than 40,000 videos or images.

The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) was created in June under pressure from governments in Europe and the United States after a spate of deadly attacks.

The forum has recently added Ask.fm, Cloudinary, Instagram, Justpaste.it, LinkedIn, Oath and Snapchat owner Snap Inc. (bit.ly/2jNtfGi)

The group shares technical solutions for removing terrorist content, commissions research to inform their counter-speech efforts and works more with counter-terrorism experts.

The database helps companies in identifying and removing matching content that violates their respective policies, or even block extremist content before it is posted.

The forum now has 68 companies as members, exceeding its initial goal of 50 companies for 2017, the consortium said in a joint statement.