Twitter and other social media platforms are under growing pressure to work harder to shut down terrorists’ accounts after the video of the brutal slaying of a Jordanian pilot circulated this week, horrifying much of the world.
Speaking in broad terms, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted this week that his platform is struggling to handle problems with harassment and abuse, informing employees in an email using blunt terms that the company is embarrassed about its failures to take stronger action against hate and violent speech that flourishes in the social media space.
“We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform, and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by the Verge.
Counter-terrorism groups want Costolo to take the admission one step further and make a public commitment to work harder to permanently shutter terrorists’ accounts that incite violence and are used to spread hatred and enlist new recruits.
The Counter Extremism Project, a nonprofit formed to combat the threat from extremist ideology, has launched a social media campaign to target and shut down terrorists’ Twitter and Facebook accounts.
Using the hashtag #CEPDigitaldisruption, over the last few months the group has monitored and exposed hundreds of Twitter accounts calling for jihadist violence and at times direct threats against individuals. The group also has reached out to Twitter to press the organization to help prevent extremists from abusing the platform, but says the group was “dismissive to the point of dereliction.”
Twitter did not respond to a request for comment by the Washington Examiner.
The service has a process whereby people can report instances of hate speech or abuse, but critics argue that it’s time-consuming and cumbersome and isn’t effective in stopping the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’s social media messaging — complaints aren’t ranked or prioritized and are simply placed into a massive docket that Twitter employees respond to in weeks, not hours or days.
Also posing a particularly vexing problem for social media services is the fact that users whose accounts are shut down can easily morph into similar-sounding new accounts and resume abusing others or spreading terrorist messages or threats. Critics argue that this is not an excuse — that the companies need to devote more resources to tracking and canceling accounts that spew hate and violence.
After the Islamic State video of the Jordanian pilot being burned alive circulated on Twitter and other social media sites, the company aggressively purged some extremists’ accounts.
Twitter has shut down the account of known terrorist recruiter with the handle Mujahid Miski several times only to have it spring back up with a similar-sounding moniker. This week Miski’s Twitter morphed into yet a different account, according to CEP. U.S. law enforcement authorities are tracking Miski, an American-born man of Somalian descent who was living in Minnesota before he joined al Nusra, a branch of al Qaeda, in Somalia and became one of the most prolific Twitter recruiters for the Islamic State in addition to his membership in al Nusra.
David Ibsen, CEP’s executive director, said Congress, the White House and the public needs to recognize the gravity of the problem. Extremists are using U.S. social media companies to spread hate and propaganda under the guise of free speech, but U.S. law does not protect certain forms of speech that cross the lines of public safety and national security.
“There has to be more of a focus on this issue — this is not a tertiary element of the war on terrorism,” he said. “This should be a main element in the battle against extremists.”
“Are we going to see something awful in this country before [the government] is compelled to do something about it?” he asked. “I hope not.”
Congress and the Obama administration, Ibsen argues, need to come up with regulatory solutions to compel social media companies to take action if they won’t do so on their own.
Despite Obama’s cybersecurity push early this year, the administration so far has not highlighted the problem of Islamic State’s exploiting U.S. social media companies to recruit and spread its propaganda.
The White House declined to comment Thursday when asked whether the Obama administration has reached out to Twitter or other social media services to begin a dialogue on the issue.
Next week the White House and Stanford University will host a cybersecurity summit that will focus on hacking threats and the damage they pose to government and private business. CEOs from a wide range of industries including financial services, technology, retail and communications companies, as well as law enforcement officials and consumer advocates will be on hand.
CEP received an invitation for the event, but the White House declined to say whether the topic of shutting down terrorist accounts and hate speech on social media also would be on the agenda.
British Prime Minister David Cameron last summer began pressing Twitter and Facebook to do more to quickly shut down accounts if the people behind them are thought to be plotting criminal activity.
One of his cabinet officials has held meetings with Twitter and Facebook officials to discuss their responsibilities in this area and said his government is reviewing whether it is possible to stop suspected terrorists or rioters from spreading their online messages.
“Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organized via social media,” Cameron said at the time, referring to a potential terrorist attack on British soil. “Free flow of information can be used for good. But it can also be used for ill. And when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them.”
During a Capitol Hill hearing last week, Evan Kohlman, the chief information officer of Flashpoint Partners, an organization dedicated to identifying online threats, said Congress likely needs to rewrite the laws governing cyberspace if Twitter and other social media services do not respond more aggressively to hate speech and violent extremism.
“Right now there is no legal remedy for anyone in the event that these companies are hosting a terrorist website,” he said.
Twitter has never been sued or held criminally liable or civilly liable because of how the Internet hosting provider law is written, “if they don’t have active knowledge of what’s going on, they’re not really responsible,” he said.
The companies, Kohlman argued, cannot hide behind free-speech rights because they have a basic responsibility to ensure that their platforms are not vehicles for hate speech or worse by terrorists and criminals.
“We’re not asking that they find every single terrorist website or they shut down every single terrorist video — just to make a best effort,” he said. “And anyone who says that the effort that’s being made right now is a best effort has no idea what they’re talking about.”
Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, asked whether it’s better to leave the terrorist social media accounts up and unfettered for the FBI and other intelligence agencies to track the posts and any plotting of attacks.
Mark Wallace, CEP’s CEO, said the intelligence value of having everything open and accessible is “incredibly overstated.”
“The value of taking down these recruiters, these propagandizers, far exceeds the intelligence value that we would get from fully tracking these individual users of social media,” he said.
“Maybe at one point, when there were only a few a long time ago, there might have been intelligence value. But right now the Internet is awash with those who would propagandize, recruit and incite terror. We have to take it down.”
