Sam Schechner gives a “heads up” in Tech Giants Target Terrorist Propaganda to plans by tech companies to counter “propaganda.”
From the post:
Nearly half a million teenagers and young adults who had posted content with terms like “sharia” or “mujahideen” began last fall seeing a series of animated videos pop up on their Facebook news feeds.
In one, cartoon figures with guns appear underneath an Islamic State flag. “Do not be confused by what extremists say, that you must reject the new world. You don’t need to pick,” the narrator says. “Remember, peace up. Extremist thinking out.”
The videos are part of three experiments—funded by Google parent Alphabet Inc., with help from Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc.—that explore how to use the machinery of online advertising to counterbalance the growing wave of extremist propaganda on the internet, both from Islamist radicals and far-right groups.
The goal: See what kinds of messages and targeting could reach potential extremists before they become radicalized—and then quickly roll the model out to content producers across the internet.
The study, detailed in a report set to be published Monday by London-based think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue, is a step toward understanding what techniques work, said Yasmin Green, who heads the counter-radicalization efforts at Jigsaw, the Alphabet unit formerly known as Google Ideas.
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Sam never gives you the link to the report from the “London-based think tank Institute for Strategic Dialogue,” which you can find at: The Impact of Counter-Narratives.
Which might lead you to discover another August 2016 publication: “Shooting in the right direction”: Anti-ISIS Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq, a study on recruitment and facilitating the use of anti-ISIS foreign fighters in Syria and Iraq.
The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) would be better named “Institute for Strategic Propaganda.”
It isn’t “propaganda” that the ISD seeks to counter but the choice of particular propaganda.
A simple count of the lives of Arabs blighted or ended by the Western Powers since 9/11 (just to pick a well known starting point), will leave you wondering who are the terrorists in this “conflict?”
If that weren’t enough disappointment, Google, Facebook and others are enabling this foolish effort by not demanding payment for their work. The lack of budget busting expenses encourages governments to act irresponsibly.