Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda
Social media companies step up battle against militant
propaganda
By Joseph Menn 6 hours ago
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Facebook, Google and Twitter
are stepping up efforts to combat online propaganda and recruiting by Islamic
militants, but the Internet companies are doing it quietly to avoid the
perception that they are helping the authorities police the Web.
On Friday, Facebook Inc said it took down a profile that
the company believed belonged to San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik, who
with her husband is accused of killing 14 people in a mass shooting that the
FBI is investigating as an "act of terrorism."
Just a day earlier, the French prime minister and
European Commission officials met separately with Facebook, Google, Twitter Inc
and other companies to demand faster action on what the commission called
"online terrorism incitement and hate speech."
The Internet companies described their policies as
straightforward: they ban certain types of content in accordance with their own
terms of service, and require court orders to remove or block anything beyond
that. Anyone can report, or flag, content for review and possible removal.
But the truth is far more subtle and complicated.
According to former employees, Facebook, Google and Twitter all worry that if
they are public about their true level of cooperation with Western law
enforcement agencies, they will face endless demands for similar action from
countries around the world.
They also fret about being perceived by consumers as
being tools of the government. Worse, if the companies spell out exactly how
their screening works, they run the risk that technologically savvy militants
will learn more about how to beat their systems.
"If they knew what magic sauce went into pushing
content into the newsfeed, spammers or whomever would take advantage of
that," said a security expert who had worked at both Facebook and Twitter,
who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
One of the most significant yet least understood aspects
of the propaganda issue is the range of ways in which social media companies
deal with government officials.
Facebook, Google and Twitter say they do not treat
government complaints differently from citizen complaints, unless the
government obtains a court order. The trio are among a growing number that
publish regular transparency reports summarizing the number of formal requests
from officials about content on their sites.
But there are workarounds, according to former employees,
activists and government officials.
A key one is for officials or their allies to complain
that a threat, hate speech or celebration of violence violates the company's
terms of service, rather than any law. Such content can be taken down within
hours or minutes, and without the paper trail that would go with a court order.
"It is commonplace for federal authorities to
directly contact Twitter and ask for assistance, rather than going through
formal channels," said an activist who has helped get numerous accounts
disabled.
In the San Bernardino case, Facebook said it took down
Malik's profile, established under an alias, for violating its community
standards, which prohibit praise or promotion of "acts of terror." The
spokesman said there was pro-Islamic State content on the page but declined to
elaborate.
ACTIVISTS MOBILIZE
Some well-organized online activists have also had
success getting social media sites to remove content.
A French-speaking activist using the Twitter alias
NageAnon said he helped get rid of thousands of YouTube videos by spreading
links of clear cases of policy violations and enlisting other volunteers to
report them.
"The more it gets reported, the more it will get
reviewed quickly and treated as an urgent case," he said in a Twitter
message to Reuters.
A person familiar with YouTube's operations said that
company officials tend to quickly review videos that generate a high number of
complaints relative to the number of views.
Relying on numbers can lead to other kinds of problems.
Facebook suspended or restricted the accounts of many
pro-Western Ukrainians after they were accused of hate speech by multiple
Russian-speaking users in what appeared to be a coordinated campaign, said
former Facebook security staffer Nick Bilogorskiy, a Ukrainian immigrant who
helped some of those accounts win appeals. He said the complaints have leveled
off.
A similar campaign attributed to Vietnamese officials at
least temporarily blocked content by government critics, activists said.
Facebook declined to discuss these cases.
What law enforcement, politicians and some activists
would really like is for Internet companies to stop banned content from being
shared in the first place. But that would pose a tremendous technological
challenge, as well as an enormous policy shift, former executives said.
Some child pornography can be blocked because the
technology companies have access to a database that identifies previously known
images. A similar type of system is in place for copyrighted music.
There is no database for videos of violent acts, and the
same footage that might violate a social network's terms of service if uploaded
by an anonymous militant might pass if it were part of a news broadcast.
Nicole Wong, who previously served as the White House's
deputy chief technology officer, said tech companies would be reluctant to
create a database of jihadists videos, even if it could be kept current enough
to be relevant, for fear that repressive governments would demand such set-ups
to pre-screen any content they do not like.
"Technology companies are rightfully cautious
because they are global players, and if they build it for one purpose they
don't get to say it can't be used for anything else," said Wong, a former
Twitter and Google legal executive.
"If you build it, they will come - it will also be
used in China to stop dissidents."
TRUSTED FLAGGER
There have been some formal policy changes. Twitter
revised its abuse policy to ban indirect threats of violence, in addition to
direct threats, and has dramatically improved its speed for handling abuse
requests, a spokesman said.
"Across the board we respond to requests more
quickly, and it's safe to say government requests are in that bunch," the
spokesman said.
Facebook said it banned this year any content praising
terrorists.
Google's YouTube has expanded a little-known
"Trusted Flagger" program, allowing groups ranging from a British
anti-terror police unit to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights
organization, to flag large numbers of videos as problematic and get immediate
action.
A Google spokeswoman declined to say how many trusted
flaggers there were, but said the vast majority were individuals chosen based
on their past accuracy in identifying content that violated YouTube's policies.
No U.S. government agencies were part of the program, though some non-profit
U.S. entities have joined in the past year, she said.
"There's no Wizard of Oz syndrome. We send stuff in
and we get an answer," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, head of the Wiesenthal
Center's Digital Terrorism and Hate project.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Tiffany
Wu)
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