Terrorist Takedown 3 English Language Pack
Dortha Chuang
The Department of Justice announced on Aug. 13 that U.S. counterterrorism authorities dismantled a series of sophisticated online fundraising campaigns run by three separate U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. The takedown of these networks underscores their vulnerabilities and also provides valuable lessons for future attempts at countering terrorism financing online.
Only 6 percent of Arabic-language hate content was detected on Instagram before it made its way onto the photo-sharing platform owned by Facebook. That compared with a 40 percent takedown rate on Facebook. 9814642000
Facebook, which owns Instagram, later apologized, explaining its algorithms had mistaken the third-holiest site in Islam for the militant group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an armed offshoot of the secular Fatah party.
Now, internal company documents from the former Facebook product manager-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen show the problems are far more systemic than just a few innocent mistakes, and that Facebook has understood the depth of these failings for years while doing little about it.
In countries like Afghanistan and Myanmar, these loopholes have allowed inflammatory language to flourish on the platform, while in Syria and the Palestinian territories, Facebook suppresses ordinary speech, imposing blanket bans on common words.
In a statement to the AP, a Facebook spokesperson said that over the last two years the company has invested in recruiting more staff with local dialect and topic expertise to bolster its review capacity around the world.
In Myanmar, where Facebook-based misinformation has been linked repeatedly to ethnic and religious violence, the company acknowledged in its internal reports that it had failed to stop the spread of hate speech targeting the minority Rohingya Muslim population.
Facebook first developed a massive following in the Middle East during the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and users credited the platform with providing a rare opportunity for free expression and a critical source of news in a region where autocratic governments exert tight controls over both. But in recent years, that reputation has changed.
Former Facebook employees also say that various governments exert pressure on the company, threatening regulation and fines. Israel, a lucrative source of advertising revenue for Facebook, is the only country in the Mideast where Facebook operates a national office. Its public policy director previously advised former right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Facebook said in a statement that it fields takedown requests from governments no differently from those from rights organizations or community members, although it may restrict access to content based on local laws.
Raed, a former reporter at the Aleppo Media Center, a group of antigovernment activists and citizen journalists in Syria, said Facebook erased most of his documentation of Syrian government shelling on neighborhoods and hospitals, citing graphic content.
Activists in Gaza and the West Bank lost their ability to livestream. Whole archives of the conflict vanished from newsfeeds, a primary portal of information for many users. Influencers accustomed to tens of thousands of likes on their posts saw their outreach plummet when they posted about Palestinians.
Palestinian advocates submitted hundreds of complaints to Facebook during the war, often leading the company to concede error. In the internal documents, Facebook reported that it had erred in nearly half of all Arabic-language takedown requests submitted for appeal.
While the group continues to hold on to its last sliver of territory in Syria, namely near the Iraqi border, its messages and propaganda online have shifted from claims of statehood and stories from inside the Caliphate to now showcasing a longer-term strategy rooted in a narrative of patience for the long-awaited Caliphate to arise again. This is depicted as resulting from protracted insurgent attacks and guerilla attrition against Western powers. There also continues a global appeal to join the movement, with the continued call for hijrah (e.g. for believers to move from Western lands to places where sharia law is practiced, i.e. Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc., versus previous calls to come to the Caliphate), alongside claims of the necessity of fighting for the Caliphate due to Muslim oppression in the West, Sunni oppression in general, and calls for vengeance against those who have collaborated against the Islamic State, among others. (See Chart 2 for sample video shares.)
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, as well as other lesser social media providers, have come to realize that allowing terrorist groups to spread their propaganda on their platforms constitutes a serious and grave danger to the public and national security, and the responsible ones have been working hard and diligently on instituting takedown policies, virtually eliminating most ISIS activity in English in a very short space of time. However, as evidenced in our recent online research, success in this regard still lags in foreign languages.
ISIS and other violent extremist groups have shown themselves to be highly resilient in the face of military and virtual challenges to their existence. At ICSVE, our view is that terrorism will continue to seduce vulnerable populations as long as good governance fails to address real and perceived grievances, as well as offer vulnerable populations positive opportunities and lives that make them disinterested in the claims of such groups. While these solutions to terrorism are financially costly, complex and require serious dedication, shorter-term fixes include delegitimizing both the groups and their ideologies, so that those who are being called to join will also turn away from them and look for less violent solutions. This is something we are attempting to do through using ISIS and al Shabaab insiders to denounce their respective terrorist groups in short video clips through our Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative Project.[xi] This is only a part of the answer, however.
Vulnerable individuals who never have the opportunity to read and view terrorist materials are much less likely to take their initial steps down the terrorist trajectory, so limiting exposure to both the groups and their poisonous ideologies is paramount. While social media platforms continue to struggle with the clever feinting maneuvers and workarounds that such groups operationalize, takedown policies continue to be a very important means of cutting down massive exposure of vulnerable populations to terrorist groups and ideologies. However, even with takedowns, there is little that can be done to prevent a user or terrorist organization from opening new, or multiple new, accounts or, as we have witnessed, using words or phrases that their followers recognize, but that artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning has not yet learned to recognize as signaling violent content.
As the Gaza war raged and tensions surged across the Middle East last May, Instagram briefly banned the hashtag #AlAqsa, a reference to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City, a flashpoint in the conflict.
For many Arabic-speaking users, it was just the latest potent example of how the social media giant muzzles political speech in the region. Arabic is among the most common languages on Facebook's platforms, and the company issues frequent public apologies after similarly botched content removals.
Such errors are not limited to Arabic. An examination of the files reveals that in some of the world's most volatile regions, terrorist content and hate speech proliferate because the company remains short on moderators who speak local languages and understand cultural contexts. And its platforms have failed to develop artificial intelligence solutions that can catch harmful content in different languages.
"The root problem is that the platform was never built with the intention it would one day mediate the political speech of everyone in the world," said Eliza Campbell, director of the Middle East Institute's Cyber Program. "But for the amount of political importance and resources that Facebook has, moderation is a bafflingly under-resourced project."
This story is based on Haugen's disclosures to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which were also provided to Congress in redacted form by her legal team. The redacted versions were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Associated Press.
The Rohingya's persecution, which the US has described as ethnic cleansing, led Facebook to publicly pledge in 2018 that it would recruit 100 native Myanmar language speakers to police its platforms. But the company never disclosed how many content moderators it ultimately hired or revealed which of the nation's many dialects they covered.
Despite Facebook's public promises and many internal reports on the problems, the rights group Global Witness said the company's recommendation algorithm continued to amplify army propaganda and other content that breaches the company's Myanmar policies following a military coup in February.
Arabic poses particular challenges to Facebook's automated systems and human moderators, each of which struggles to understand spoken dialects unique to each country and region, their vocabularies salted with different historical influences and cultural contexts.
The Moroccan colloquial Arabic, for instance, includes French and Berber words and is spoken with short vowels. Egyptian Arabic, on the other hand, includes some Turkish from the Ottoman conquest. Other dialects are closer to the official version found in the Quran. In some cases, these dialects are not mutually comprehensible, and there is no standard way of transcribing colloquial Arabic.
Scores of Palestinian journalists and activists have had their accounts deleted. Archives of the Syrian civil war have disappeared. And a vast vocabulary of everyday words has become off-limits to speakers of Arabic, Facebook's third-most-common language with millions of users worldwide.