Facebook admits industry could do more to combat extremism

Facebook conceded that technology companies could do more to counter online extremism after British PM Theresa May and French president Emmanuel Macron, proposed fining firms that move too slowly to remove extremist content being shared by terrorist groups, the Guardian newspaper reported Thursday.

The social media giant told a meeting between political leaders and its own executives as well as others from Google and Microsoft at the United Nations general assembly in New York that it is now employing thousands of content reviewers around the globe and a staff of 150 people dedicated to countering terrorism on its platform in an attempt to remove more extremist content.

Facebook sources said the company accepted the industry could do more and said it was committed to building more technology to help address these issues. But it said it was already accelerating its efforts, in particular by using artificial intelligence (AI) to flag up extremist content and sharing this data with rival firm.

“AI has begun to help us identify terrorist imagery at the time of upload so we can stop the upload, understand text-based signals for terrorist support, remove terrorist clusters and related content, and detect new accounts created by repeat offenders”, Facebook’s director of global policy management Monika Bickert told.

However, the company said human oversight was still necessary, because there remained limitations to the technology. “AI can spot a terrorist’s insignia or flag, but has a hard time interpreting a poster’s intent.” Bicker added.

Source : Mena