Social media firms tapped to help curb terrorism

San Francisco

SOCIAL media companies came under fire again last week after another mass shooting was linked to a hate-filled manifesto posted online.

For years, Twitter Inc and Facebook Inc largely reacted to horrific events after the fact. Now, they are being asked by politicians to take a more proactive approach to prevent domestic terrorism. But while the companies certainly want to make their platforms safe and not be seen as nests for violence or hatred, the proposals from politicians wouldn't be easy to achieve and could even backfire on some of the proponents.

The attacker in El Paso, Texas, who killed 22 in a rampage at a Walmart Inc store last Saturday, posted a racist screed on message site 8chan minutes before the attack began, laced with words and phrases US President Donald Trump has used in reference to immigrants and the media.

Last Monday, the president ordered federal officials to work with social media companies to identify people who may perpetrate mass shootings before they can act. He asked tech companies to find "red flags" in social media postings that would help deter shooters before they strike and the FBI has put out a call for a contract on social media monitoring technology to parse public user postings to predict threats.

On Friday, the White House called a meeting with tech companies to discuss violent online extremism. The group "focused on how technology can be leveraged to identify potential threats, to provide help to individuals exhibiting potentially violent behaviour, and to combat domestic terror", according to White House spokesman Judd Deere.

The requests are complicated to put in place. FBI monitoring would go against Facebook's and Twitter's rules that bar the use of data from their sites for government surveillance. And efforts to take down posts that espouse the anti-immigrant and anti-minority sentiment often expressed by mass shooters could also end up capturing posts from politicians, including Mr Trump himself. Social media companies are already accused by Mr Trump and other politicians of harbouring anti-conservative bias.

Still, the companies may be able to come up with strategies for thwarting future attacks if they look at the online forums popular with people with extreme views that have been linked to violent events and collaborate about what they find. The proclivity for mass murder might be near-impossible to predict in an individual, especially when combined with other factors such as easy access to guns. But Facebook and others have already built up systems to counter Islamic terrorist content.

Here's a look at how they could apply similar tactics to domestic white nationalists, without FBI surveillance:

After the attacks on two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March, the companies said they would expand the group's mandate to include "violent extremism in all its forms". But it's unclear if the system is working yet.

Facebook, Twitter and YouTube wouldn't say specifically whether they shared hashes related to the El Paso shooting. Facebook said it used the system after the attack occurred to find and ban clips of the shooter's manifesto and anything praising the attack, but only on the company's own properties.

"You can't just say something is white supremacist unless you define really specifically what that is," said Alex Stamos, a former Facebook security executive, now an adjunct professor at Stanford University. "That's one of the real challenges of the system." While companies can move quickly to share information about posts glorifying or depicting an attack so that they can be taken down, it's difficult to do without catching legitimate news organisations in the mix as they report on the events.

That shouldn't be an excuse, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and a senior adviser at the Counter Extremism Project.

"This is the technology industry - they solve enormous problems," Prof Farid said. "I don't buy the argument that it's too complicated."

"If you're Facebook or YouTube, there's not a lot of things you can do to stop 8chan," said Mr Stamos, "but you can at least increase the gap between users of your site and of that site, so that there are fewer opportunities to lure people there". Making the platform harder to find would make it more difficult to recruit people to extremist groups, according to Eshwar Chandrasekharan, a PhD student in computer science at Georgia Tech. He has studied the effect of the message board Reddit banning some of its most hateful groups, and found the members didn't re-congregate elsewhere on the site.

But, Mr Stamos said, the companies are unlikely to take this step, out of concern regulators would consider it anti-competitive.

"Do not let them do this," Prof Farid said. "It will be incredibly dangerous." BLOOMBERG