Major social media firms of the United States last week testified before a U.S. Senate panel on their efforts to remove violent content from their online platforms
Facebook, Twitter Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google told the Senate Commerce Committee that they are putting utmost efforts to prevent extremist or violent contents from their online platforms in response to a wave of several high-profile incidents by making use of more technologically advanced tools to respond quickly to such contents.
Not only the U.S. Congress was showing grave concern about the social media being used by people committing violent incidents like mass shooting and other brutal acts; but critics were also saying that social media websites are not responding appropriately by immediately removing many videos or posts that contain too violent contents with extremist groups supporting terrorism at the back of such contents.
There is much need of social media to do more to prevent violent content on their online platforms, said Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat.
Facebook’s software detection system came reducing the average time required by company’s AI to 12 seconds in finding any violation on Facebook Live, which counts a 90% reduction in average time to detect a violent content from time to do so a few months ago, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, told the Senate Commerce Committee.
Public Policy Director of Twitter, Nick Pickles said that between August 2015 and December 2018, there were more than 1.5 million accounts that have been blocked by the website for violating its policy by promoting terrorism on their accounts, out of which more than 90% accounts were suspended through platform’s proactive measures.
From Alphabet Inc unit Google’s, global director of information policy, Derek Slater said that to the question about preventing violent contents online, answer is the use of a combination of people and technology, as people can help tackle with the right shade of the disturbing material whereas technology can improvised identifying patterns of those violent contents.
