Dec 8 2015, 4:35 pm ET
Social Media
Companies Face Uphill Battle in Trying to Keep Terrorists Out
by Harriet
Taylor, CNBC from:nbcnews.com
After the recent spate of terrorist attacks inspired by
the so-called Islamic State, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have called
for greater cooperation from social media companies like Facebook, YouTube and
Twitter in combating hate propaganda.
For sure, these companies already invest huge resources
in preventing their platforms from being used as terrorists' loudspeakers. But
with billions of users across the globe posting content daily, it's an uphill
and expensive battle.
Susan Etlinger, an analyst at Altimeter Group who covers
data intelligence, analytics and strategy suggests a tighter partnership
between the social platforms and the government could be the answer.
"The challenge is that the social platforms, they're
not experts in homeland security. They do not necessarily know what they're
looking for. For them to infer what they're looking for, it could exclude
really important signals and include unimportant signals, and that would be
overwhelming." she said.
There is some very sophisticated technology for the
government to use to try to understand what credible threats look like,"
she said.
Of course, any increased cooperation between social media
companies and the authorities could drive bad actors further underground and
violate user trust — a social network's No. 1 concern.
"We are talking about major issues that the public
is wary about in terms of how the government, the NSA and other enforcement agencies is making use of user
data," said Forrester analyst Nick Hayes. "From a resources
perspective, if they really wanted to focus more on monitoring they
could."
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are not the only social
platforms utilized by terrorists, but they are the most prominent such tools in
the U.S. Each has long-standing policies in place to handle terror-related
content and accounts, and all work with authorities and the community at large
to thwart attacks.
Facebook has teams around the globe so it can review
reported content 24 hours a day. Employees receive specialized training in
identifying content that could be tied to terrorism, they speak several dozen
local languages and also work with police. Experts say that the language
component is particularly important.
"The need to be able to translate in real time and
determine if that indicates a real threat is very difficult," said
Etlinger. "If Twitter incorrectly identifies you as someone who is going
to buy a hybrid car, that is very different from them identifying you as
someone who's in contact with ISIS."
For the alias account set up by Tashfeen Malik — the
woman linked to the San Bernardino, California, terror attack — Facebook closed
it the day after the shooting for violating its terms
of service. The company
also relies heavily on its 1.5 billion global users to flag anything that could
be terror related. That content is fast tracked to the front of the queue for
review.
A spokesperson for Facebook told CNBC it shares the
government's goal of keeping terrorist content off its site and issued this
statement.
"Facebook has zero tolerance for terrorists, terror
propaganda, or the praising of terror activity and we work aggressively to
remove it as soon as we become aware of it. If we become aware of a threat of
imminent harm or a planned terror attack, our
terms permit us to
provide that information to law enforcement and we do."
In the first half of 2015, the company said it responded
to 17,577 U.S. law enforcement requests for data on 26,579 users or accounts
across all of its properties (Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and Instagram).
Government requests for information have increased 53 percent from 2013, the
year the company first started making these requests public (after the Edward Snowden
revelations). The vast majority of those requests — 80 percent — produced some
data. Facebook also receives government requests to remove content that
violates the law, but does not make those numbers public.
Like Facebook, YouTube also has teams in place around the
globe, working around the clock to examine and remove content that could be
terror related. It relies entirely on its community of more than a billion
users to police the platform for content that violates its terms of service. In
March 2014, the company launched the "Trusted Flagger" program to
empower preapproved users including individuals, organizations and the
authorities, to do just that.
With the sheer volume of content on the site, YouTube
says it is impossible to monitor everything. A YouTube Trusted
Flagger video explains
the importance of its community when it comes to surfacing content that
violates its terms of service: "Every minute, users upload hours video to
YouTube, and watch hundred of millions of videos. With that many videos popping
up on YouTube, we couldn't possibly watch them all, that's why we rely on our
community of hundreds of millions of users to flag content that they believe is
inappropriate."
Here's what a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to
CNBC:
"YouTube rejects terrorism and has a strong track
record of taking swift action against terrorist content. We have clear policies
prohibiting terrorist recruitment and content intending to incite violence and
quickly remove videos violating these policies when flagged by our users. We
also terminate accounts run by terrorist organizations or those that repeatedly
violate our policies. We allow videos posted with a clear news or documentary
purpose to remain on YouTube, applying warnings and age-restrictions as
appropriate."
According to the most recent numbers posted by Alphabet,
YouTube's parent company, it received 9,981 U.S. government requests for user data in the first half of 2014, an 8.6 percent
decrease year over year. YouTube also fields U.S. government requests to remove
illegal content from its platform — in the second half of 2014 (the most recent
period for which the company makes data available) it received 3,523 U.S.
government content removal requests.
For Twitter, the number of U.S. government requests for
user data have skyrocketed since 2013 — the company has seen a 170 percent
increase in just the past two years. In the first half of 2015, it fielded 2,436 U.S. government requests with 80 percent of those requests producing some
information. (Like Facebook and YouTube, Twitter receives such requests from
foreign governments as well.)
Twitter also fields content removal requests and received 25 requests from U.S. authorities covering
71 accounts. It complied with all of those requests.
"Violent threats and the promotion of terrorism
deserve no place on Twitter and our rules make that clear. We have teams around
the world actively investigating reports of rule violations, and they work with
law enforcement entities around the world when appropriate," the company
said in a statement. It also provides detailed guidelines
for law enforcement on how to
request information about Twitter accounts through a valid legal process.
Although Twitter has been criticized for allowing the
proliferation of ISIS-related accounts on its platform, closing down accounts
linked to terrorists may not be particularly effective — with new accounts
cropping up as soon as others are shut down — or ever very desirable.
"It becomes this whack-a-mole issue that you have to
deal with." said Hayes.
"When you do enable these accounts to remain online,
you in some sense are able to gain more intelligence. You start collecting more
information about the individuals and group if you keep them more active,"
he said.
Ultimately, said Hayes, it comes down to privacy versus
national security. "There really is no easy answer to this," he said.
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