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Facebook: AI spots 99% of al-Qaida, IS content

Humans train software to spot terrorist posts

By Jeremy Kahn, Bloomberg
Published: November 30, 2017, 6:00am

Facebook’s artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at keeping terrorist content off the social network, the company has said.

Today, 99 percent of Islamic State and al-Qaida-related content Facebook removes is detected by the company’s AI before any user flags it, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, head of counter-terrorism policy, said Wednesday. They said in some cases the software was able to block the content from ever being posted in the first place.

The executives cautioned that Facebook’s automated solutions are still imperfect, however. “A system designed to find content from one terrorist group may not work for another because of language and stylistic differences in their propaganda,” they said.

As a result, Facebook said it had concentrated its efforts on IS and al-Qaida, “the terrorist groups that pose the biggest threat globally.” Facebook hopes to eventually expand its automated tools to target content from other, more regionally-focused terrorist organizations, too, according to the executives.

Facebook has faced increased criticism around the globe from governments concerned that the social network provides a platform for terrorist propaganda and recruitment. British Prime Minister Theresa May has been particularly vocal in her attacks on social media companies and has sought to rally the leaders of other democracies to impose greater regulation on these tech businesses.

Partly in response, Facebook has joined forces with Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube, a division of Alphabet Inc., to form the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism. The group helps companies coordinate their efforts to combat terrorist content and to share insights with smaller technology companies. Terrorist groups are increasingly turning to newer, smaller social networks as they have been kicked from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The forum also provides a venue for the tech companies to have their views heard by often hostile governments.

Bickert and Fishman said humans were still needed to curate the databases of terrorist posts, videos and photographs used to train Facebook’s AI software. Human experts were also needed to review the decisions being made by the automated tools, they said.Facebook is hiring more linguists, academics, former members of law enforcement and former intelligence analysts to perform these roles.

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