Some of the web’s biggest destinations for watching videos have quietly started using automation to remove extremist content from their sites, according to two people familiar with the process.

The move is a major step forward for internet companies that are eager to eradicate violent propaganda from their sites and are under pressure to do so from governments around the world as attacks by extremists proliferate, from Syria to Belgium and the United States.

YouTube and Facebook are among the sites deploying systems to block or rapidly take down Islamic State videos and other similar material, the sources said.

The technology was originally developed to identify and remove copyright-protected content on video sites. It looks for "hashes," a type of unique digital fingerprint that internet companies automatically assign to specific videos, allowing all content with matching fingerprints to be removed rapidly.

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The question — "Pictures on the radio?" — was raised, not just by outsiders, but also by some within NPR early on, Somodevilla said, adding that Gilkey confided that he felt some colleagues were less than welcoming early on, not understanding the value of video and images. He said that was one of the biggest accomplishments of Gilkey and his NPR Visuals team colleagues (who number about a dozen people): "Making people at NPR believers in visual storytelling."

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Michael Oreskes, NPR's news chief, told me that when Gilkey was hired, NPR "recognized that no news organization can be only in one form of distribution. We have to be in digital, and digital now means half a dozen different things. So our roots are in radio and we are still very focused on radio, but NPR.org has 30- something million viewers every month, and that's a visual platform. Yes, it's true that radio is for your ear and the visuals on radio are the pictures we paint with our words. But there are lots of people who want our kind of journalism, but they want to get it in a different way."

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