The news comes from the United Kingdom, where The Telegraph describes Anthony House, Google’s London-based Senior Manager, Public Policy and Communication, telling members of the House of Commons’s home affairs select committee in some very convoluted language that Google is “working on counter-narratives around the world” with two pilot programs.
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Google, Facebook, and Twitter are among dozens of Silicon Valley companies that have come under pressure in recent years to help fight jihadi propaganda online.
Users of Google that search for extremist-related material will be shown anti-radicalisation ad results, a senior executive at the company has revealed to MPs. “We don’t want our platform to be an unsafe place”.
Google said Tuesday it is considering using its search algorithms to dissuade potential jihadists from engaging in extremist activities, British media reported.
House also said that Google was working hard to remove extremist content from its services. AdWords, in case the term is unfamiliar, are the tiny ads you might ignore that appear among your Google search results with a small yellow box reading “Ad” next to them. Facebook and Google confirmed that they don’t notify account-holders in the United Kingdom if cops are sniffing around their online activities as part of a criminal probe.
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”.
House and Milner said their threshold was “threat to life”, while Nick Pickles, UK public policy manager at Twitter, told the MPs: “We don’t proactively notify”.
The executives appeared before the committee to be questioned on their companies’ efforts to tackle online extremism and radicalization by groups such as Daesh terrorist group.
Dr House also told MPs that Google removed 14 million videos from YouTube in 2014 – many of them because of terrorist content. We have initiated discussions on that matter and more generally on how extremist material can be taken down from such sites, and we will be progressing that work.
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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.
