fbpx

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Facebook and Stanford officials discuss online terrorist propaganda

PALO ALTO — The Nazis harnessed the power of radio in the 1930s to reach the masses, but with social media sites rising in popularity, terrorists today have raised the bar when it comes to spreading propaganda, panelists said Tuesday night at a talk hosted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

“ISIL is much more sophisticated about this work than anyone has ever been,” said Beth Van Schaack, a visiting professor at Stanford Law who has also advised the U.S. Department of State on criminal justice issues. “If you remember the old Osama Bin Laden videos, they would come up. They were clearly out of date. They were just sort of simple, grainy photographs and now these are done with the sort of tools of Hollywood.

Social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter have tried to combat terrorist activity on social media, pulling down accounts that violate their rules and relying on users to flag hateful content or spread counter messages. But in the wake of the San Bernardino shootings and Paris attacks, U.S. lawmakers have been pressing tech firms to do more.

Finding the right solutions, though, is not easy.

“There is both a challenge and difficulties for these companies dealing with free speech and privacy,” said Steven Luckert, the museum’s senior program curator in an interview. “It’s a very difficult issue for a lot of social media companies to deal with. It’s a very complicated question.”

From September through December 2014 at least 46,000 Twitter accounts were used by Islamic State supporters, though not all of them were active, according to a 2015 report from the Brookings Institution.

Facebook does not allow people to use the site to facilitate or organize criminal activity or celebrate any crimes committed. It also removes content that expresses support for terrorist activity or organized criminal activity.

But with 1.5 billion users on Facebook, up to a million posts can be flagged in a week, and for every account that gets pulled down, another pops back up. Reports of potential terrorist activity goes to the front of the queue and Facebook employees look over the reports to see if they violate their rules, said Anne Kornblut, the company’s director of strategic communications and a former senior editor at the Washington Post.

“I have been at Facebook for three months and I have yet to see that magical algorithm,” she said during a panel discussion at the Oshman Family JCC’s Taube Koret Campus for Jewish Life. “I think that human judgment is what has to come into play as these decisions are made.”

For the U.S. government, thwarting extremists who use social media to recruit followers has been a high priority, too.

Last week, top Obama administration officials including the president’s Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and FBI Director James Comey met with representatives from Apple, Facebook, Twitter and other tech firms to discuss ways to make it harder for terrorists to use technology to recruit followers.

That same week, White House officials announced a new counterterrorism task force to combat terrorism and their use of social media.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., also reintroduced a bill in December that would require technology companies to report online terrorist activity to law enforcement.

On Tuesday night, President Barack Obama strayed away from drawing parallels to the past in his comments about terrorism in his final State of the Union address.

“As we focus on destroying ISIL, over-the-top claims that this is World War III just play into their hands,” Obama said. “Masses of fighters on the back of pickup trucks and twisted souls plotting in apartments or garages pose an enormous danger to civilians and must be stopped. But they do not threaten our national existence. That’s the story ISIL wants to tell; that’s the kind of propaganda they use to recruit.”


Originally published HERE.