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| HostAdvice |
Facebook, Google and Twitter have been making headlines again and again
this year over their attempts, failures and promises to respond to the
spread of extremist ideas on their platforms. They've brought in new
ideas, policies, software upgrades and even staff departments to deal
with the issue and while it certainly hasn't gone away, some marginal
progress has been made.
The issue is that extremism and hate speech doesn't die off, it just
changes shape, and when you plug one hole it finds another. At a recent
conference in London, the founder and sole operator of image sharing
site Justpasteit.com detailed his struggles with an unexpected and
intolerable influx of terrorist activity.
When this kind of thing happens on large scale platforms, there are a
myriad of countermeasures in place to deal with it, from reporting to
blocking to account removal. When it's just one guy sat in his home
office fielding complaints in languages that he doesn't speak, it's not
quite so straightforward. A healthy intake of active users doesn't
guarantee a sophisticated system, and in many cases sites get popular
long before they get any kind of real funding, office space or full-time
personnel. Clearly, terrorist groups are starting to twig to that.
Another issue that Mariusz Żurawek
(Just Paste It's founder) raised was that if he's asked to get law
enforcement involved, he has little way of knowing, nation to nation, if
he's helping or hindering the situation by doing so. Żurawek is running
a website, he is not an international diplomat, but those are the kind
of pressures that are being placed on him and other small time digital
platform owners. It's a deeply unpleasant and unfair situation.
So what's the solution? Allow extremists to operate on larger platforms
where they can be monitored? Obviously not, but really this issue has no
immediately obvious solution, the internet cannot be policed, and sites
with less funding will always suffer from inferior security.
The image-hashing database developed jointly by Facebook, Twitter,
Microsoft and Google may provide an answer, though. It's a sophisticated
system with a proven record of identifying extremist content. If that
technology were open-sourced and offered to smaller sites, as well as a
system of legal aid and general advice on how to deal with issues like
this, this spread of hate onto sites that can't manage it could well be
contained.
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