Facebook has announced plans to tackle online terrorism in efforts to address criticism levelled at the company following a number of terrorist attacks in the UK and abroad. The social media giant has turned to both man and machine in this latest move to fight terrorist content.
Facebook has hired over 150 counter-terrorism specialists in its fight against terrorists, as well as looking to develop and deploy smart technology.
In a blog post, Monika Bickert, Director of Global Policy Management and Brian Fishman, Counterterrorism Policy Manager said: “Although our use of AI against terrorism is fairly recent, it’s already changing the ways we keep potential terrorist propaganda and accounts off Facebook.
“We are currently focusing our most cutting edge techniques to combat terrorist content about ISIS, Al Qaeda and their affiliates, and we expect to expand to other terrorist organisations in due course.”
Read more:Google, Facebook & Microsoft promise to tackle terrorist propaganda
The company has deployed AI technology in the form of five different tools, which individually focus on different aspects of terrorist propaganda.
This includes systems that are able to recognise whether uploaded images or videos match terrorist media content, enabling a ban to be put on this type of media from reaching the site at all.
Algorithms have also been applied to analyse all supporting material that has any support of terrorism, which are based on whether an account is friends with a number of accounts that have been disabled for terrorism.
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Facebook also says it has also made improvements to track terrorists. It has been able to detect fake accounts and reduce the amount of time terrorist accounts can be used on the site.
The company are currently experimenting with AI to work with the ability to understand the text in support of terrorist organisations and therefore develop text-based signals that may relate to terrorism.
Facebook has also begun deploying its techniques across all its platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram, by doing so Facebook will share all collected data to its platforms.
The company understands that the use of AI technology alone will not be able to tackle everything, therefore Facebook has partnered with Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook to develop a database of hashes so that the same content does not reach other sites.
