Facebook has announced that it took down over 12 million pieces of terrorist content on its social network between April and September. According to the criteria, terrorist content is identified and flagged as any kinds of post that praise, endorse or represent ISIS, Al Qaeda and other affiliate groups across the social media network.
The removal of the terrorist content is part of an on-going effort by Facebook to rid its service of harmful content, which also includes misinformation, propaganda, and spam. A lot of the material removed was old. But Facebook said it removed 2.2 million brand new terrorist posts in the second quarter and 2.3 million in the third quarter, up from 1.2 million in the first quarter.
Further, the company has said that it has reduced the median time taken to take a post, image or video by more than half and still addressing the loopholes exploited by the terrorists to circumnavigate the algorithms.
The removal of online content by Facebook is an important decapitator for the global terrorist organization radicalizations and influencing people. ISIS and al-Qaeda tend to use social media as a way of advancing their agenda, getting recruits and mobilizing resources and as such social media monitoring is crucial in the dismantling of the organizations’ communication infrastructure.
