Digital Warfare: Facebook Reveals Its Counterterrorism Strategy

During his appearance at the 17th annual international conference of the Institute for Counter Terrorism, Facebook’s lead policy manager on counterterrorism, Brian Fishman, explained how the popular social network deals with attempts to post terror-related content.

Facebook’s digital systems first filter content using buzzwords before forwarding the suspect posts to a team of some 150 lawyers and policy experts, with Fishman describing this process as "using humans to do what humans do best, and computers for what computers do best," according to Jerusalem Post.

Furthermore, it turns out that social media networks share an industry database of unique digital fingerprints known as ‘hashes’ of terror-related content like violent imagery or recruiting material, in order to help each other quickly identify and remove such data.

Finally, the newspaper points out that earlier Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube held the first meeting of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, and that these measures help the companies deal with users who Fishman dubbed as "recidivists" – people who continue to post extremist content using fake accounts after getting banned for such activity.

"None of this is perfect. But we're trying to get better," Fishman said.