Hours after the December shootings in San Bernardino, Calif.,
Mark Wallace asked his employees at the nonprofit Counter Extremism
Project to comb social media for profiles of the alleged
attackers.
They failed. A team at Facebook Inc. had already removed a
profile for Tashfeen Malik, after seeing her name in news
reports.
The incident highlights how Facebook, under pressure from
government officials, is more aggressively policing material it
views as supporting terrorism. The world's largest social network
is quicker to remove users who back terror groups and investigates
posts by their friends. It has assembled a team focused on
terrorist content and is helping promote "counter speech," or posts
that aim to discredit militant groups like Islamic State.
The moves come as attacks on Westerners proliferate and U.S.
lawmakers and the Obama administration intensify pressure on
Facebook and other tech companies to curb extremist propaganda
online. Top U.S. officials flew to Silicon Valley on Jan. 8 to
press their case with executives including Facebook Chief Operating
Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Last week, Twitter Inc. said it suspended
125,000 accounts associated with Islamic State.
Tech companies "have a social responsibility to not just see
themselves as a place where people can freely express themselves
and debate issues," Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who ran the U.S.
Defense Intelligence Agency from 2012 to 2014, said in an
interview.
Facebook's new approach puts the company in a tight spot,
forcing it to navigate between public safety and the free-speech
and privacy rights of its nearly 1.6 billion users.
After the Jan. 8 meeting, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a
nonprofit privacy organization, urged Facebook and other tech
companies not to "become agents of the government."
Facebook said it believes it has an obligation to keep the
social network safe.
Political winds have shifted since the 2013 disclosures by
former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about
government surveillance. Then, Facebook assured users that the U.S.
government didn't have direct access to its servers and started
regularly reporting the volume of government requests for user
data. The enhanced push against extremist content is a separate
initiative.
Leading Facebook's new approach is Monika Bickert, a former
federal prosecutor whose team sets global policy for what can be
posted on the social network.
Facebook takes a hard line toward terrorism and terrorists, she
said. "If it's the leader of Boko Haram and he wants to post
pictures of his two-year-old and some kittens, that would not be
allowed," said Ms. Bickert, Facebook's head of global policy
management.
Facebook relies on users to report posts that violate its
standards, such as images that "celebrate or glorify violence."
After an attack, it scours news reports or asks police agencies and
activists for names so it can remove suspects' profiles and
memorialize victims' accounts.
Facebook has strengthened the process over the past year. The
social network says it uses profiles it deems supportive of
terrorism as a jumping-off point to identify and potentially delete
associated accounts that also may post material that supports
terrorism.
Executives say they began this fanning-out process, which they
use only in terrorism cases, about a year ago after consulting with
academics and experts who said terrorists typically operate in
groups. The searches are conducted by a multilingual team—part of
the community operations group that reports to Ms. Bickert—which
examines the events people have attended or pages they have
"liked," among other things.
In some cases, Ms. Bickert consults Facebook lawyers about
whether a post contains an "imminent threat." Facebook's legal team
makes the ultimate decision about whether to notify law
enforcement. Simply posting praise of Islamic State may not fit the
bill.
Neither Facebook nor law-enforcement agencies would discuss in
detail how closely they cooperate, in part to avoid tipping off
terror groups, they said. Facebook also wouldn't discuss the
criteria it uses to determine what material supports terrorism and
how many terror experts it has hired.
Some counterterrorism experts say Facebook shouldn't quickly
delete user accounts, so police can monitor them and possibly snare
others. But Ms. Bickert, who worked on public corruption and
gang-related violence cases as a prosecutor, said leaving up
terrorist messages could cause harm.
The company is also helping activists who try to discredit
organizations like Islamic State with counter-propaganda. That
includes lessons on how to create material more likely to be shared
and go "viral," said Erin Saltman, a senior counter-extremism
researcher for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. Facebook also
offers ad credits worth hundreds of dollars to groups to defray the
cost of testing their campaigns.
Facebook's new approach wins plaudits from some academics and
activists, who say the company is more helpful than other tech
firms. Mr. Wallace of the Counter Extremism Project, a former U.S.
ambassador to the United Nations, calls Facebook "the social-media
company that's on the greatest trajectory to be a solution to the
problem."
Some find Facebook's changes more rhetorical. David Fidler,
professor of law at Indiana University, attended a recent panel at
the U.N. featuring Ms. Bickert and other tech executives. He said
the executives offered few specifics beyond "our terms of service
don't have a place for terrorism."
Ms. Bickert said the U.N. meetings made her realize Facebook
needed to be more public about its efforts.
In Washington, the House in December passed a measure that
requires the Obama administration to devise a strategy to combat
terrorists' use of social media. A Senate proposal would extend to
terrorism a 2008 law that requires Facebook and other tech
companies to report content related to child pornography to law
enforcement.
Some see parallels between the two areas. In 2009, when tech
companies were struggling with how to deal with child pornography,
Microsoft and Hany Farid, a computer science professor at Dartmouth
College, developed a tool to identify child-porn images and prevent
users from sharing them. Facebook uses the tool.
Mr. Farid said the approach could be adapted to create a
database of catchphrases or hashtags used by terrorism supporters.
Facebook and other experts say the two problems are different.
"When it comes to removing support of terrorism, the work is
highly contextual," said Ms. Bickert.
Write to Natalie Andrews at Natalie.Andrews@wsj.com and Deepa
Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 11, 2016 20:35 ET (01:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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