After Twitter, Facebook to go after terrorists' accounts

After the micro-blogging platform Twitter that took down several terrorists' accounts in recent months, it is the turn of social media giant Facebook to ramp up its counter-terrorism strategy to tackle online extremism.

According to a Quartz report, Facebook has posted a job description on its site for one counterterrorism researcher.

"The candidate will be responsible for helping drive our efforts around identifying the latest tools, tactics, and infrastructure used by terrorist actors as they affect Facebook and its ecosystems to better defend against and disrupt these threats," the posting read.

In September, the company joined with the Israeli government to take down what that government sees as terrorist content.

Facebook has claimed to have taken down 95 per cent of the content flagged by the Israeli government.

In its continued effort to curb terrorism-related activities, the micro-blogging website Twitter recently suspended additional 235,000 accounts for violating its policies related to promotion of terrorism in the last six months.

Twitter had announced the blocking of more than 125,000 accounts earlier this year which were primarily related to the Islamic State (IS) terror group.

In addition to the account suspensions, Twitter's global Public Policy team has expanded its partnerships with organisations working to counter violent extremism (CVE) online.

According to a latest study by the US-based Brookings Institution, IS supporters may be operating over 46,000 active Twitter accounts.

--IANS

na/ksk