Facebook uses Artificial Intelligence to counter terrorism

As the people have started questioning social media sites about their role in countering terrorism, Facebook said that it uses artificial intelligence (AI) to remove the terror-related content.

The social media giant is currently focusing their techniques to combat terrorist content about Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda and their affiliates.

"Although our use of AI against terrorism is fairly recent, it's already changing the ways we keep potential terrorist propaganda and accounts off Facebook," the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

Facebook also understands the language where it uses AI to interpret text that might be advocating for terrorism. It also identities pages, groups, posts or profiles as supporting terrorism by using algorithms.

Ensuring that terrorists have no place anywhere in the Facebook apps, the company has begun to work on systems to take action against terrorist accounts across all its platforms, including WhatsApp and Instagram.

"We want Facebook to be a hostile place for terrorists. The challenge for online communities is the same as it is for real world communities to get better at spotting the early signals before it's too late," Facebook noted.

"A photo of an armed man waving an IS flag might be propaganda or recruiting material, but could be an image in a news story. Some of the most effective criticisms of brutal groups like ISIS utilize the group's own propaganda against it. To understand more nuanced cases, we need human expertise," Facebook stated.