Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda | Hacker News Reader

Social media companies step up battle against militant propaganda

reuters.com

15 pointshokkos6 comments

This just smells like the start of censorship creeping into these platforms...

Twitter was pivotal in the Arab Spring. I can't see Twitter ever being pivotal again in future struggles if regimes can demand them to censor rebellious accounts

It's not "social" if the society can be censored.

Edit: Now that Twitter will be closing "terrorist" accounts, how long until Japan demand Twitter to close the @SeaShepherd account?

I'm of the belief that most active terrorist orgs are unlikely to have a strong Facebook presence, and that even if they do, they're unlikely to do anything of a threatening nature there. If anything, it would seem as though you might want to keep whatever is happing there for honeypot reasons.

To be fair, you'd be surprised how many criminals seem to seek glory for their actions and then wonder how they get arrested afterwards.

Just ask all the criminals who stole things, got involved in selling drugs, etc, then boasted about it on Facebook. There have been cases of criminals boasting about their killings online, or their plans for mass attacks. I remember the shock when one of these crimes had turned out to have been planned on 4chan or another similar site.

People who break the law are often driven as much by personal fame and glory as anyone else, and both the internet companies shutting their accounts and the police and security services carefully monitoring them are good ideas for just that reason.

The 4chan example was the mass shooting at a community college in Oregon.

Personally I find a connection between how many people see computing as a black box, and the criminals who insist on posting there deeds to social media and elsewhere. To them it's a magical conduit to millions of people. I wonder if there's a deeper study into this because as a software developer I find it hard to believe that others can't at least get a sense that it's all derived from 1's and 0's.

Recruiting and promoting their cause is threatening in itself. It seems as if the goal is to minimize the exposure of jihad groups. Considering they directly attack and oppose western culture and values, this is justified. Many people in the west are currently highly critical of Islam, which can make devout Muslims feel disenfranchised, and reach out to extremist groups. If the option to connect with extremist groups is taken away, we can get together as a society and develop strategies to reform Islam to be more compatible with Western culture. Christians have reformed their religion to be more compatible with modern progressive views over the years.

I would also point out that there is a danger in perceived complacency (a.k.a. honeypots).

Here's a metaphor of sorts: An MMORPG has a large number of "bots" which farm valuable items and in game experience. Player A bots and does not get banned. Player A tells Player B he did not get banned. Player B starts to bot. The botting problem intensifies.

People will see the persistence of social media presence by terror groups as an ineptitude of western governments. This will motivate them to try to exploit this weakness in whatever way they can think of.

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