With terrorists increasingly trying to use the online platforms to promote radicalisation through hate and terror content, internet and social media companies like the Facebook (FB), Twitter and Google have joined hands to combat the menace in India. These companies are using a mix of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Image Matching, language Understanding, anti-spam tools, and human experts to identify and bring down terror and radicalisation material.
In response to the queries by The Pioneer, FB, Google and Twitter said they have intensified efforts to check them. However, they conceded this is not an easy job given the enormous traffic on the web.
In a bid to quickly identify terror content, and slow its spread online, FB, Microsoft, Twitter and Google recently came together to have a shared industry database of “hashes” — a unique digital fingerprints for photos and videos — to check content produced by or in support of terrorist organisations. Besides, Google has also announced investing $5million as Innovation Fund to counter hate and extremism.
“Because we don’t want terrorists to have a place anywhere in the family of FB apps, we have begun work on systems to enable us to take action against terrorist accounts across all our platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram… Working to keep terrorism off FB is not enough because terrorists can jump from platform to platform. That is why partnerships with others are so crucial,” FB told The Pioneer. FB said it has positioned nearly 150 terrorism specialists who can operate in 30 languages to keep an eye on the online content.
“Combatting terrorism requires responses from Government, civil society and the private sector, often working collaboratively. The Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism was founded to help do just this and we have made strides in the past year through initiatives like the Shared Industry Hash Database. We will continue our efforts in the years to come, focusing on new technologies, in-depth research, and best practices. Together, we are committed to doing everything in our power to ensure that our platforms are not used to distribute terrorist content,” FB spokesperson said.
Between January and June 2017, Twitter claims to have brought down 2.99 lakh terrorist accounts. Similarly, between July and December 2016, Google claims to have received 25 requests from the Indian Government to block and remove contents concerning national security. YouTube claimed to have taken down 83 per cent of the videos for violent extremism in September. FB, between June-December 2016, responded to 52 per cent of the Indian Government’s requests with regard to action sought on 9,932 user accounts though it is not clear how much of these were related to national security and terrorism.
It was observed that since early 2016 there has been a massive shift from Twitter to Telegram among ISIS terrorists and sympathisers. “Our research shows that Twitter is no longer a conducive space for ISIS supporters. Twitter’s aggressive pro-ISIS account take-down activity means that the once vibrant and extensive IS Twitter network is now almost non-existent,” Dr Maura Conway of Voxpol wrote.
Twitter added it using anti-spam tools to bring down accounts having content related to terrorism. “We have seen that in the last six months we have seen our internal, spam-fighting tools play an increasingly valuable role in helping us get terrorist content off of Twitter,” Twitter representative said.
“In total, 455, or 63 per cent, of the pro-ISIS accounts in our dataset were suspended in just three months…We estimate that the total loss of ISIS-supportive accounts over the period was probably greater than 90 per cent,” Twitter said while adding that due to its proactive approach there has been a 20 per cent decline in terror content compared to previous years. It said 75 per cent such accounts were suspended before their first tweet.
“Twitter’s continued commitment to eliminate such activity from our platform has resulted in an 80 per cent reduction in accounts reported by Governments compared to the previous reporting period of July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2016. Notably, Government requests accounted for less than 1 per cent of account suspensions for the promotion of terrorism. Instead, 95 per cent of these account suspensions were the result of our internal efforts to combat this content with proprietary tools,” Twitter said.
FB said that with nearly 2 billion people every month, posting and commenting in more than 80 languages in every corner of the globe, it faces enormous challenge to keep people safe on its platform. “In the past year we have also significantly grown our team of counterterrorism specialists. When we receive reports of potential terrorism posts, we review those reports urgently and with scrutiny. And in the rare cases when we uncover evidence of imminent harm, we promptly inform authorities,” FB spokesperson said.
He added that FB uses things like Artificial Intelligence, Image Matching, language understanding etc to track down terrorist content before people can see it. “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. We are constantly updating our technical solutions,” FB said adding it has put in place systems to detect new fake accounts created by repeat offenders.
Google said it has built efficient systems to review the majority of valid notifications in less than 24 hours, and to remove terror content. “Earlier this year we removed a number of specific webpages from Google properties in India after a court ruled that they violated Indian law,” Google said. The company claims to be using a mix of technology and human review for better detection and faster removal of objectionable content. Youtube, for instance is using special mechanism that sends search for certain terror or violent extremism related key words to a playlist of videos. Youtube claimed that over 83 per cent of the videos it removed for violent extremism in September were taken down before receiving a single human flag. “We recently began developing and implementing cutting-edge machine learning technology designed to help us identify and remove violent extremism and terrorism-related content in a scalable way,” Youtube said.