Twitter’s $1.6 million pledge to help fight the White House’s
anti-terror immigration order is just the latest case of social media
companies taking on Trump, but critics say the same companies are doing
next to nothing to stop dangerous radicals from using their platforms to
spread hate.
According to sources, radical social media accounts are using photos of
Nawar al-Awlaki,
the 8-year-old daughter of cleric Anwar al-Awlaki who was killed in the
U.S.-led raid in Yemen on Sunday, to recruit members. That’s just the
latest in a plethora of social media strategies and campaigns created by
extremists to recruit and spread their jidhadi message.
“Recruitment has many forms, and sharing the news of
her death and her picture can be seen as a motivation to some to join
the jihadi cause,” a spokesperson for the Middle East Media Research
Institute (MEMRI) told Fox News. “MEMRI’s Jihad and Terrorism Threat
Monitor has observed many accounts, both jihadi and non-jihadi,
discussing the killing of Nawar al-Awlaki and displaying her picture.”
Companies like Twitter and Facebook
have been hit with a slew of civil lawsuits
the past year alleging that the companies are liable for the deaths of
those killed in terror attacks by ISIS and organizations that have used
social media platforms to spread their message. Among those suing are
the families of the Pulse Nightclub victims,
who filed a lawsuit against Twitter, Facebook and Google alleging the
companies provided “material support” to ISIS and helped radicalize the
shooter.
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A Facebook spokesperson told Fox News that terrorist activity is not allowed on the platform.
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“Facebook has zero tolerance for terrorists, terror
propaganda, or the praising of terror activity,” a spokesperson for
Facebook told Fox News. “We work aggressively to remove it as soon as we
become aware of it.”
But the social media giant relies heavily on the
Facebook community, of almost 1.7 billion users, to report activity that
violates community standards and shows any traces of extremism.
Facebook, then, confirms the account of interest, immediately removes it
from the platform, and then attempts to identify related material
through accounts with associated activity.
But critics say this isn’t a reliable way of tracking
accounts of those individuals who have hijacked their profiles to
promote propaganda.
“Social media sites and applications have been
propaganda multipliers, allowing them to connect with potential
followers across countries, cultures and languages,” House Homeland
Security Chairman Michael McCaul wrote in a counterterrorism strategy
report released last fall. “Social media companies are on the virtual
frontlines of the fight and must be proactive in removing terrorist
content—they should ensure that their terms and conditions expressly
prohibit such material and that takedowns are done quickly to prevent
extremist messages from spreading.”
Twitter officials, who did not respond to Fox News’
request for comment regarding its strategy, shut down hundreds of
thousands of accounts for threatening or promoting terrorist attacks
since mid-2015. Facebook said it has teams around the globe to review
reported content 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
But still, small technology companies feel there is more that could be done.
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“Users don’t know what they’re looking for –you need
to be schooled,” Eric Feinberg, founding member of Global Intellectual
Property Enforcement Center, told Fox News. “Some of these things aren’t
in English –you can’t rely on people who don’t know what to look for.”
Feinberg’s firm uses a technology that scans for
hashtags across social media platforms in different languages for
communication that indicates terrorist planning.
But Christopher O’Rourke, CEO of Soteria, a
cybersecurity firm based in Charleston, South Carolina, told Fox News
that extremists are not as “naïve” as people think.
“We’ve been following them for years. They use code
words, they are covert,” O’Rourke, who is a former U.S.
government-sponsored cyberhacker who worked with the tailored access
operations within the NSA, told Fox News. “It’s the silent, smart ones
using technology to their benefit that are the most risk for causing
problems. You wouldn’t pick up on subtle nuances –you’d notice if
someone threatened ‘infidels’, but the thing about terrorists is the
smart ones know how to blend in and you can’t really differentiate
that.”
O’Rourke criticized Facebook, saying that the company
has data on how users interact on the platform, but the algorithms have
failed them in the past, such as reports last year of Facebook not
sharing certain partisan information, which the company blamed on an
algorithm error.
“At the end of the day, computers are not as
intelligent as a proper analyst,” O’Rourke told Fox News. “Good, old
fashioned man power and communication with law enforcement is what we
need.”