Technology

Facebook Uses Artificial Intelligence to Fight Terrorism

Liza Nichole

June 17, 2017

The social media company said in a blog post that it will use AI to find and remove terrorist content before other users see it.

“Our stance is simple: There’s no place on Facebook for terrorism”, Monika Bickert, director of global agency management, and Brian Fishman, counterterrorism policy manager, wrote in a blog post. “We remove terrorists and posts that support terrorism whenever we become aware of them. When we receive reports of potential terrorism posts, we review these reports urgently and with scrutiny”.

Facebook said its AI efforts in counterterrorism are still recent. But the one method the social network uses is image matching. That means if someone posts a picture of a known terrorist, Facebook’s software can match it to, for example, a propaganda video from ISIS, or other images, or videos from extremist content Facebook has already removed.

The company is also experimenting with ways to understand and analyze language on the site that might be used to advocate terrorism. Facebook is also looking to extend these methods to the other apps it owns, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

“We believe technology, and Facebook, can be part of the solution”, Bickert and Fishman wrote.

Facebook has been grappling with challenging questions about its scale and influence, as nearly 2billion people use the social network every month. In the last few months, the site has received blowback for fake news being circulated on its site.

Facebook Live, the social network’s live streaming video service, has also been used to broadcast murder and violence on site.

Facebook is also partnering with other agencies and organizations. And in December, the social network partnered with other tech companies, including Twitter, Microsoft, and Google-owned Youtube, to create an industry database that records the digital fingerprints to terrorist organizations.

“We want Facebook to be a hostile place for terrorists”, Bickert and Fishman wrote. “The challenge for online communities is same as it is for real world communities to get better at spotting the early signals before it’s too late”.