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Facebook to Make Use of AI Technology to Tackle Terrorism

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Facebook Inc will now be using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to contain terrorist activities on its platform.

For some time now, Facebook and a host of other social media companies have been under government and law enforcement agencies’ scrutiny for their inability to contain the spread of terrorism.

After recent attacks on Manchester and London, British PM Theresa May came down heavily on these companies. She also urged governments across the globe to create legal paraphernalia to impose sanction/levy fines on companies who fail to curb extremist activities on their platform.

Yesterday, in a lengthy blog post, in response to such widespread criticism, Facebook’s Director of Global Policy Management, Monica Bickert, and Counterterrorism Policy Manager, Brian Fishman stated “In the wake of recent terror attacks, people have questioned the role of tech companies in fighting terrorism online. We want to answer those questions head on. We agree with those who say that social media should not be a place where terrorists have a voice. We want to be very clear how seriously we take this — keeping our community safe on Facebook is critical to our mission.”

The post further added that it was going to wipe out terrorism by using advanced algorithms that can detect images, text, pages or groups that seem to promote extremism. Once such things are spotted, Facebook will “also use algorithms to “fan out” and try to identify related material that may also support terrorism. It will use signals like whether an account is friends with a large number of accounts that have been disabled for terrorism, or whether an account shares the same attributes as a disabled one.” 

Facebook also emphasized that it is not solely reliant on AI technology to root out extremism. The company has formed a dedicated team of 150 members specializing in countering terrorism over the past few months. This team comprises academic experts on counterterrorism, ex-prosecutors and law enforcement agents as well as engineers.

Also, the company said that it is seeking the cooperation of governments, researchers and the society in addition to fellow tech companies to contain the spread of terrorism from one platform to another.

A few months back, Facebook, along with Twitter Inc. , Microsoft Corp. (MSFT - Free Report) and Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL - Free Report) , collaborated to curb extremist activities on social media platforms. The companies said that all of them are getting together to identify the images, video and other media that has radical content, and create a shared database for the same. Facebook said that it was looking to add more partners to this collaboration.

Bickert further stated that so far, Facebook has been “cautious” in its approach as there is no easy solution to the issue. However, she added that despite massive challenges, Facebook remains committed to becoming a “hostile” terrain for terrorists and it will continue to work in that direction.

Zacks Rank & Stock Price Movement

At present, Facebook carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

In the past one year, Facebook has vastly outperformed the broader market. Shares of Facebook have grown over 30.9% compared with the Zacks categorized Internet Service industry’s gain of 22.5%.

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