Facebook has been doubling down upon terrorists, extremists, and other people spewing hate of late. Considering the huge, huge amount of users that the platform boasts of, ensuring that none of the content being posted on the platform is extremist propaganda can be pretty hard. Which is why Facebook has been attempting to slowly but surely, bring machine learning into play.
So the AI Facebook is training, is special for several reasons. One, it will target extremists spreading propaganda but, it will not focus on any particular creed, or religion. So for instance, the AI will not just limit itself to Muslim extremists. Instead, the AI will target any and all groups that have a violet propaganda, or missions that are unhealthy to those around them.
Facebook is using the accounts that have been already suspended, to get a feel of what these people do that can help the company point them out. In other words, it is training its AI to pro-actively identify posts that need to be removed using data from the accounts that have already been suspended.
Speaking on the topic, Facebook’s director of global policy management, Monika Bickert said:
We’re currently experimenting with analyzing text that we’ve already removed for praising or supporting terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda so we can develop text-based signals that such content may be terrorist propaganda. That analysis goes into an algorithm that is in the early stages of learning how to detect similar posts.
In recent times, Facebook and its peers have come under fire for ostensibly helping terrorists ins spreading their propaganda. The way we have see European nationals go on marauding sprees is a testament that at least some of their strategies are succeeding. This has led to governments across the world (and particularly in Europe) rethinking about the regulation of cyberspace.
Facebook’s latest attempt to combat the threat using machine learning will have a lot of implications for the future. And judging by the rapidly deteriorating state of things in Europe, it is imperative that concrete actions are taken — and quickly.
