by Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff
European officials demand Google, Facebook and Twitter take faster action on "online terrorism incitement" • Facebook says it has banned content praising terrorists • Wiesenthal Center, which combats anti-Semitism, among YouTube's "trusted flaggers."
Photo credit: Reuters
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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 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 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 whoever 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 three are among a growing
number of Internet companies 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.
After the San Bernardino attack, 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.
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 as 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 jihadist 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."
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 that this year it banned 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.
Reuters and Israel Hayom Staff
Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=30239
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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