The Islamic State has used social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to recruit members and rally their supporters, and tech companies are thinking about ways to fight back.
Earlier this month, executives from Apple, Facebook, and Twitter met with White House officials in a summit to discuss how to combat terrorism, the Guardian reports.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg discussed one way that users could fight terrorist groups online: with “like” attacks.
Sandberg gave an example of where German uses swarmed a neo-Nazi page on Facebook with likes and positive messages, the Guardian reports.
“What was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then tolerance and messages of hope,” she said, and applied that model to ISIS.
“The best thing to speak against recruitment by ISIS are the voices of people who were recruited by ISIS, understand what the true experience is, have escaped and have come back to tell the truth. ... Counter-speech to the speech that is perpetuating hate we think by far is the best answer.”
Facebook and Twitter has been criticized for not being diligent enough in taking down pages that belong to ISIS, but also face pressure from free-speech activists who think that a wide deployment of the ban-hammer is gratuitous. Twitter, for instance, has once called itself “the free speech wing of the free speech party.”
