It also heard evidence from Twitter and Facebook, during a session that examined whether extremists used social media as a recruiting tool-as alarmed politicians sometimes like to define it. The home affairs panel challenged the Internet companies on whether they were doing enough to prevent their services from being “hijacked” by extremists. Google and Facebook declined to give figures publically.
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Google Inc.’s United Kingdom users who search for extremism-related entries will be redirected to anti-radicalization links in a bid to counter online influence of religious fanaticism, a company executive told British lawmakers.
Google says it’s planning to show people searching for extremist-related material anti-radicalisation links.
While the pilot program runs in limited markets, these campaigns work like any other search ad campaign where the advertiser – and in this case the nonprofit – chooses the search terms they want their ads to run against.
Governments across the world have been attempting to promote so-called “counter-narratives” to extremist material such as ISIS beheading videos in order to encourage moderate Muslims to reject terrorist ideology.
The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, and Huffington Post were among many outlets to mistakenly report on Tuesday that Google had launched a pilot program to re-direct the search results of terms associated with extremist groups.
Simon Milner, Facebook’s policy director for United Kingdom and Ireland, Middle East, Africa and Turkey, said that the site has become a “hostile place” for Isis: “Keeping people safe is our number one priority”.
Facebook and Google said they adopted a “threat to life” threshold when considering notifying the police.
Dr House said later: “We offer Google AdWords Grants to NGOs so that meaningful counter-speech ads can be surfaced in response to search queries like “join Isis”. We have worked very hard to disrupt what they do. Last year, the company removed more than 14 million videos from YouTube for reasons ranging from copyright infringement to terrorist content. YouTube members also flagged more than 100,000 videos as being inappropriate content.
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The extremism taskforce has been looking at how social media companies respond to government requests relating to extremist material and hate crimes.
