Just one day before President Barack Obama touted efforts to undermine the online reach of jihadist groups four tech giants — Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google’s YouTube — announced that they will collaborate on a database of manually tagged extremist content. The Counter Extremism Project on Tuesday praised the move, if in tempered language. CEP Senior Advisor Dr. Hany Farid said that, even though it’s his technology that the companies would use, he heard about the final decision just 12 hours before the announcement. “I think, initially, Microsoft and Facebook said, ‘Yes, we want to do this with the [CEP].’ I think Google hemmed and hawed a little bit. Twitter really hemmed and hawed. I think this was the compromise. All the companies wanted everybody on board for political cover.”