Facebook vows to fight terrorism with new algorithms and artificial intelligence
Facebook has a terrorism problem, and its vowing to fix it. On Thursday, the social media giant announced new plans to use artificial intelligence to scrape words, images, and video in order to wipe terrorist propaganda from its network entirely.
The only catch? It still requires a team of 150 counterterrorism experts as well as plenty of other people to fight extremism on the platform. We can only hope this new AI tool is as sophisticated as Facebook claims it is.
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"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 organizations in due course," Facebook said in a statement about the update.
The announcement comes in the wake of growing pressure from governments and individuals affected by terrorism to make Facebook remove materials such as terrorist propaganda or other user-generated content that could incite violence.
In Thursday's statement, Facebook said it has put together a team of more than 150 people "exclusively or primarily" focused on countering terrorism as their core responsibility. The group includes counterterrorism experts, former prosecutors, former law enforcement, and engineers.
The social media company will also work with various partners like Institute for Strategic Dialogue and Affinis Labs to "push back against extremism and hate online," according to the statement.
Facebook's public discussion of its counterterrorism efforts is the first in a new series of efforts from the company to bring more transparency and discussion to the myriad of problems that Facebook has either created or contributed to.
Called "Hard Questions," it's meant to push the company forward on topics while also soliciting more feedback from the public. Facebook also announced that it created a brand new email address — hardquestions@fb.com — where you can send feedback or suggestions for problems it should address. So let them know your thoughts!
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Facebook remains tight-lipped about how exactly most of its underlying technology works, but the company took a major step forward in sharing details around its image matching technology.
Video fingerprinting called "hashes" are being used to help Facebook's algorithms find and ultimately terminate extremist videos before they're ever posted or made public.
The only downside is that this new form of image scanning doesn't prevent people from joining Facebook, then using it to communicate with and ultimately recruit others using messaging.
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It's also unclear how well the new system understands the context of these images. For example, an image of an ISIS flag could be used in propaganda both for and against the terrorist organization—an example Facebook noted remains a challenge.
Another complication is that terrorist activity is moving to new areas of the internet, such as encrypted messaging services Telegram and Facebook-owned WhatsApp. There are also new challenges presented by Facebook Live, the streaming service that lets people broadcast video to the public instantly in real time.
The decision to publicly announce the update represents a major shift for Facebook in regards to transparency. In the past, the social network has made editorial decisions like this privately. Thursday's announcement is an obvious attempt to be more transparent and certainly a step in the right direction—but it's clear that Facebook faces more challenges than its fancy algorithms are probably able to solve. Our crazy world is nuanced, and machines are not yet ready to make difficult judgement calls, even by Facebook's own admission.
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