Facebook after the lean figure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal is working to grow its reputation with useful services for security. Yesterday he announced that he was also involved in counter-terrorism: he would elaborate an algorithm able to track down and remove from the platform propaganda contents linked to extremist groups, in particular Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
According to reports from the vice president for the management of global policies, Monika Bickert, and the head of anti-terrorism policy, Brian Fishman, in the period between January and March 2018, the social network would have acted on 1,9 million related content to ISIS or Al-Qaeda, double the previous quarter.
At the moment, the new detection tools would take an average time of less than a minute to discover new content that supports terrorism from the moment they are put online. In this context, Bickert and Fishman said: "Terrorist groups are always trying to get around our systems, so we have to continually improve and update them. We learn from every mistake, we experiment with new methods of detection and we work to expand the range of terrorist groups we monitor ".
In one post, Bickert and Fishman stated that "taking action means removing most of the content and adding a warning to a small part, which had been shared for informational or counter-information purposes". In some cases, entire profiles, pages or groups are closed for violating Facebook policies, making their content unavailable. In this context, in the post we read: "We have made important steps in finding and removing their propaganda quickly and on a large scale. We do not delude ourselves that the work is finished, rather it is only at the beginning ".
In this context, Bickert and Fishman reiterated that the company's goal is to remain neutral regarding ideology and policies, which means that, for Facebook, the definition of terrorism can be applied equally to religious extremism and to violent separatism. In this sense they declared: "It is about the fact that they use violence to achieve these goals".
In early April 2018, Twitter also reported that it had suspended, since 2015, more than 1 million "promotion of terrorism" accounts and has begun work to make the platform "an unwanted place" for those who want to urge to violence. Between July and December 2017, Twitter suspended 274.460 accounts "for violations related to the promotion of terrorism".
As seen also the social networks are changing "skin" is to maintain the reputation and fidelity are moving towards social policies with high emotional impact, since for various events began to lose hundreds of thousands of accounts.