Social network Facebook has been accused of automatically generating celebratory jihadist videos and promoting terrorist business pages.
The videos were uncovered by an anonymous whistleblower who filed a complaint with a US regulator, accusing Facebook of misleading investors on its efforts to clean up the platform.
A five-month study of more than 3000 accounts found Facebook’s artificial intelligence algorithms were creating ‘memories’ and video celebrations for active users, including accounts of extremist organisations such as al-Qaeda, white supremacist groups, and self-identified Nazis.
A business page generated by Facebook for al-Qaeda received over 4400 “likes” and provided the group with “valuable data” to use when recruiting new followers, according to the complaint.
Islamic State and al-Qaeda terrorists are also openly networking on Facebook’s website, according to the whistleblower’s research.
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The confidential complaint, supported by the US National Whistleblower Centre (NWC), said 38 per cent of profiles containing symbols belonging to terrorist groups were taken down.
“We hope that SEC takes prompt action to impose meaningful sanctions on Facebook and that this information stimulates a public debate about the accountability of social media companies for addressing terrorist recruiting and other organised crime on their websites,” NWC executive director John Kostyack said in a statement.
A Facebook spokesman, however, said the company was taking steps to remove terror-related content from the platform.
“After making heavy investments, we are detecting and removing terrorism content at a far higher success rate than even two years ago,” he told 9News in a statement.
"We don't claim to find everything and we remain vigilant in our efforts against terrorist groups around the world."
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed in a December 2018 Facebook post that the social platform had taken considerable steps against the spread of extremist content.
“For stopping the spread of harmful content, we've built AI systems to automatically identify and remove content related to terrorism, hate speech, and more before anyone even sees it,” he said.
“These systems take down 99 per cent of the terrorist-related content we remove before anyone even reports it, for example.”
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One of the Longest downs on Facebook history- Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger are all affected.
