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 On Friday, Facebook Inc said it took down a profile that the company
believed belonged to San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik, who with
her husband is accused of killing 14 people in a mass shooting that
the FBI is investigating as an "act of terrorism."
Just a day earlier, the French prime minister and European
Commission officials met separately with Facebook, Google, Twitter
Inc and other companies to demand faster action on what the
commission called "online terrorism incitement and hate speech."
The Internet companies described their policies as straightforward:
they ban certain types of content in accordance with their own terms
of service, and require court orders to remove or block anything
beyond that. Anyone can report, or flag, content for review and
possible removal.
But the truth is far more subtle and complicated. According to
former employees, Facebook, Google and Twitter all worry that if
they are public about their true level of cooperation with Western
law enforcement agencies, they will face endless demands for similar
action from countries around the world.
They also fret about being perceived by consumers as being tools of
the government. Worse, if the companies spell out exactly how their
screening works, they run the risk that technologically savvy
militants will learn more about how to beat their systems.
"If they knew what magic sauce went into pushing content into the
newsfeed, spammers or whomever would take advantage of that," said a
security expert who had worked at both Facebook and Twitter, who
asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.
One of the most significant yet least understood aspects of the
propaganda issue is the range of ways in which social media
companies deal with government officials.
Facebook, Google and Twitter say they do not treat government
complaints differently from citizen complaints, unless the
government obtains a court order. The trio are among a growing
number that publish regular transparency reports summarizing the
number of formal requests from officials about content on their
sites.
But there are workarounds, according to former employees, activists
and government officials.
A key one is for officials or their allies to complain that a
threat, hate speech or celebration of violence violates the
company's terms of service, rather than any law. Such content can be
taken down within hours or minutes, and without the paper trail that
would go with a court order.
"It is commonplace for federal authorities to directly contact
Twitter and ask for assistance, rather than going through formal
channels," said an activist who has helped get numerous accounts
disabled.
In the San Bernardino case, Facebook said it took down Malik's
profile, established under an alias, for violating its community
standards, which prohibit praise or promotion of "acts of terror."
The spokesman said there was pro-Islamic State content on the page
but declined to elaborate.
ACTIVISTS MOBILIZE
Some well-organized online activists have also had success getting
social media sites to remove content.
A French-speaking activist using the Twitter alias NageAnon said he
helped get rid of thousands of YouTube videos by spreading links of
clear cases of policy violations and enlisting other volunteers to
report them.
"The more it gets reported, the more it will get reviewed quickly
and treated as an urgent case," he said in a Twitter message to
Reuters.
A person familiar with YouTube's operations said that company
officials tend to quickly review videos that generate a high number
of complaints relative to the number of views.
Relying on numbers can lead to other kinds of problems.
Facebook suspended or restricted the accounts of many pro-Western
Ukrainians after they were accused of hate speech by multiple
Russian-speaking users in what appeared to be a coordinated
campaign, said former Facebook security staffer Nick Bilogorskiy, a
Ukrainian immigrant who helped some of those accounts win appeals.
He said the complaints have leveled off.
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A similar campaign attributed to Vietnamese officials at least
temporarily blocked content by government critics, activists said.
Facebook declined to discuss these cases.
What law enforcement, politicians and some activists would really
like is for Internet companies to stop banned content from being
shared in the first place. But that would pose a tremendous
technological challenge, as well as an enormous policy shift, former
executives said.
Some child pornography can be blocked because the technology
companies have access to a database that identifies previously known
images. A similar type of system is in place for copyrighted music.
There is no database for videos of violent acts, and the same
footage that might violate a social network's terms of service if
uploaded by an anonymous militant might pass if it were part of a
news broadcast.
Nicole Wong, who previously served as the White House's deputy chief
technology officer, said tech companies would be reluctant to create
a database of jihadists videos, even if it could be kept current
enough to be relevant, for fear that repressive governments would
demand such set-ups to pre-screen any content they do not like.
"Technology companies are rightfully cautious because they are
global players, and if they build it for one purpose they don't get
to say it can't be used for anything else," said Wong, a former
Twitter and Google legal executive.
"If you build it, they will come - it will also be used in China to
stop dissidents."
TRUSTED FLAGGER
There have been some formal policy changes. Twitter revised its
abuse policy to ban indirect threats of violence, in addition to
direct threats, and has dramatically improved its speed for handling
abuse requests, a spokesman said.
"Across the board we respond to requests more quickly, and it's safe
to say government requests are in that bunch," the spokesman said.
Facebook said it banned this year any content praising terrorists.
Google's YouTube has expanded a little-known "Trusted Flagger"
program, allowing groups ranging from a British anti-terror police
unit to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a human rights organization, to
flag large numbers of videos as problematic and get immediate
action.
A Google spokeswoman declined to say how many trusted flaggers there
were, but said the vast majority were individuals chosen based on
their past accuracy in identifying content that violated YouTube's
policies. No U.S. government agencies were part of the program,
though some non-profit U.S. entities have joined in the past year,
she said.
"There's no Wizard of Oz syndrome. We send stuff in and we get an
answer," said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, head of the Wiesenthal Center's
Digital Terrorism and Hate project.
(Reporting by Joseph Menn; Editing by Jonathan Weber and Tiffany Wu)
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