Facebook uses AI to combat terrorism

San Francisco: Facebook has used artificial intelligence (AI), which helps people to remove social media sites, as they have started to question social media sites about their role in counterterrorism. The social media giant now focuses on their technology to combat terrorist issues in the Islamic State (IS), al-Qaeda and their subsidiaries. OnThursday "Although our use of the AI against terrorism is very recent, it already changes the way we conduct terrorist campaigns and accounts from Facebook," the company stated it. The Facebook image matching technique is used to identify and delete terror-related content. "When a user tries to upload a photo or video of a terrorist, see our systems are not appropriate for the movie Terrorism Photo or Video." 

"This means that if we previously removed a propaganda video from IS, we can work to prevent other accounts from uploading the same video to our site. In many cases, this means that terrorist content intended for upload to Facebook simply never reaches the platform," Facebook explained. Facebook also understands the language where it uses AI to interpret text that might be advocating for terrorism. It also identities pages, groups, posts or profiles as supporting terrorism by using algorithms. "We've also gotten much faster at detecting new fake accounts created by repeat offenders. Through this work, we've been able to dramatically reduce the time period that terrorist recidivist accounts are on Facebook," the company said.

Ensuring that terrorists have no place anywhere in the Facebook apps, the company has begun to work on systems to take action against terrorist accounts across all its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram. "We want Facebook to be a hostile place for terrorists. The challenge for online communities is the same as it is for real world communities -- to get better at spotting the early signals before it's too late," Facebook noted. Apart from using AI, Facebook also uses human expertise to figure out what supports terrorism. "A photo of an armed man waving an IS flag might be propaganda or recruiting material, but could be an image in a news story. Some of the most effective criticisms of brutal groups like ISIS utilize the group's own propaganda against it. To understand more nuanced cases, we need human expertise," Facebook stated.