Counter-terrorism on Twitter, Facebook, and social media

As representatives from 68 countries are gathering in Washington DC for the Meeting of Ministers of the Global Coalition on the Defeat of ISIS hosted by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the U.S. Department of State, governments and technology groups are upping their efforts to fight terrorism online.

In his introductory remarks at the Coalition meeting, Secretary Tillerson highlighted the role of social media in countering terrorist messages and in the fight against ISIS. He stressed how the cooperation with Silicon Valley has contributed to a 75% reduction of ISIS content online in one year.

“We all should deepen our cooperation with the tech industry to prevent encrypted technologies for serving as tools that enable extremist collaboration,” Tillerson said.

He added: “We need the global tech industry to develop new advancements in the fight and we thank those companies which are already responding to this challenge. We must capitalize on the strong advancements in data analytics and algorithmic technologies to build tools that discover ISIS’ propaganda and identify imminent attacks.”

Tillerson’s message was strong:

A digital Caliphate must not flourish in the place of a physical one.

He added: “As we have seen from attacks in Nice, Berlin, Orlando, and San Bernardino, the Internet is ISIS best weapon for turning a recruit in to a self-radicalized attacker.”

The final statement of the Coalition meeting, the 68 countries participating agreed to intensify their efforts to confront ISIS in the digital battlespace and reshape the public narrative around ISIS to one of failure.

“Members will continue their collaboration to discredit ISIS’s propaganda, emphasizing credible, authentic voices that provide alternative narratives to challenge ISIS’s world view,” the statement read.

We will work with the private sector to develop long-term, sustainable initiatives that make communities, especially youth, more resistant to ISIS’s message. We welcome private sector initiatives to prevent ISIS and its supporters from exploiting social media platforms. These include technical means to facilitate removal of material which violates terms and conditions for users.

The role of Silicon Valley is key in the success of the campaign against ISIS and terrorism.

In its tenth transparency report and on the 13th anniversary since the first tweet, Twitter showed that they suspended a total of 636,248 terror-related accounts in the period of August 1, 2015 through December 31, 2016.

During the reporting period included in the latest transparency report— July 1, 2016 through December 31, 2016 — a total of 376,890 accounts were suspended for violations related to promotion of terrorism.

Most of the accounts suspended, about 74 percent, consisted of accounts surfaced by Twitter’s own internal, proprietary spam-fighting tools.

The report includes a new section with Government terms of service (TOS) reports.

“This new section is limited to data about government reports to remove content in violation of Twitter’s terms of service (TOS) against the promotion of terrorism,” the company said while stating that government TOS reports represent less than 2% of all suspensions.

“It also includes an update on the company’s continued work to remove terrorist content from our platform beyond government reports.”

Back in August last year, Twitter strongly condemned the use of the platform by terror-related organization and stressed its commitment “to eliminating the promotion of violence or terrorism on our platform.”

Our efforts continue to drive meaningful results, including a significant shift in this type of activity off of Twitter.

In December last year, Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook, and Youtube announced a shared-industry database to help identify terrorist-related content spreading across their platforms and to speed up takedowns and suspensions.

“But it’s fair to say that the issue of terrorist takedowns is just the tip of the political iceberg that has crashed into social media giants in recent times,” TechCrunch reports.

Trolls, fake news, and hate speech have become huge problems for many online platforms, and in particular for Twitter and Facebook in the wake of the U.S. election last year with many criticizing the two social media companies of skewing political discourse by incentivizing the sharing of misinformation and enabling the propagation of far right extremist views.

At Facebook, beyond a team of counter-terrorism researchers and analysts who review content 24/7 days a week, the platform relies heavily on community policing, as Monika Bickert explained in a recent interview with Yahoo! Finance.

Bickert, Facebook’s head of counterterrorism efforts and global product policy, is in charge of setting and enforcing the platform’s community standards and to monitor content produced, shared, and consumed by its 1.86 billion users.

One of the global initiatives that Facebook has been working on — through a joint venture with the US Department of State and marketing firm EdVenture Partners — is the Peer to Peer program, an attempt to crowdsource and aggregate insights from university students across the world and empower positive voices at a local level.

“We’re taking these local voices at more than 200 universities around the world and asking students: ‘What are the issues in your community? Where is violent extremism coming from? And how can we best counter that?” Bickert explained.

She added: “Students are the most credible voices and they know the issues better than anybody. At the same time, the insights are shared among all the universities…that allow the program to reach tens of millions of people.”

While the Peer to Peer program has been so far very successful, the question is still how to scale these efforts and to understand the results at a local level and on a global scale, and in particular when it comes to fight the use of Facebook and its platforms to share and amplify terror-related content.

“We want to make sure we’re removing any content from our site if it glorifies terrorism, if it promotes a terrorist group or if it’s from a terror group,” Bickert said.

“But we know that even if Facebook could perfectly keep any terrorist activity from hitting our community and even if every other internet company or social media platform could do the same, we know that that’s still not ultimately the solution to countering violent extremism,” she added. “Instead we need to make sure that we are allowing people to have a dialogue in a constructive way and help amplify voices from the community that are pushing back on these violent ideologies.”

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