While Facebook and Youtube have entered the war of constantly checking their content on extremism and remove it, Google have chosen to avoid this war. During the last year Google has developed an intelligence system to target the ISIS recruiters
In collaboration with the startup Moonshot CVE, Google has used their Jigsaw technology to find potential ISIS terrorists and tries to convince them to not join the group. They found 1,700 keywords which are used by ISIS recruiters and use them with algorithms to create targeted advertising. With the advertising they hope to inform the individuals of the current location in stead of the unrealistic view ISIS recruiters create. In the trial period they already target 320,000 individuals which together looked at more than half a million minutes of advertising video’s.
By research Google found individuals which joined ISIS because they got a positive view of the world of ISIS. Yasmin Green, head of development and research of Jigsaw, spoke with a 13-year old girl which had decided to join ISIS and had already planned a flight to the Middle East. The girl was targeted online by ISIS recruiters and was told she has the possibility to live in an Islamic Disneyworld.
Google tries to target this people and shows them the real ISIS world by showing real videos of the area they are fighting. It’s hard to measure the effectiveness of this strategy but the click-trough rate of this advertisements is 70% in comparison with the other advertisements on the same keywords and the people who click spent more than twice as long viewing the video as the estimates of how long people view Youtube as a whole.
Although this numbers may seem quite positive, they haven’t been able to really decrease the individuals who joined ISIS yet. I am not sure Google will ever decrease this number effectively , but I do think it is a good way to create a more reliable outline of the current situation and therefore convince people who are not that sure about ISIS to not join the group.
Sources:
http://www.businessinsider.com/jigsaw-redirect-method-to-stop-isis-recruits-2016-9
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/07/google-program-to-deradicalize-jihadis-will-be-used-for-right-wing-american-extremists-next/
Hi Lotte! Thank you for your blogpost. While I agree with you that Google may not be able to decrease this number effectively, I believe they may be able to convince a certain group not to join. Maybe, if they can locate the ISIS recruiters, they can target them to be stopped, instead of convincing people not to join. Of course, I am not certain if that is possible, but it is definitely interesting to see what technology can do to reach and convince people (either positive or negative).
Hi Lotte,
Thank you very much for this blog post. I was not aware of Google’s strategy to fight extremism, but I have to say that it is one of the tech world’s most sensible response to the problem of online extremism in particular and online political misinformation in general. Confronting potential recruits with counterweighting information that challenges their world view and realistically shows the brutality of IS, instead of just deleting content, seems a better solution for several reasons: First, while deleting content makes recruitment harder, it does not change the mind of persons already convinced of IS’s extremist world view. Google’s approach meanwhile combats extremism directly. Another additional feature that would be desirable but be to advertise de-radicalization programs to potential IS-recruits.
The second reason why I believe that Google’s strategy is superior, is the fact that it avoids the implications of just deleting content for free speech. After all, Twitter’s and Facebook’s strategy set a precedent for deleting political content in the future, justifying the repression of certain opinions on any side of the political spectrum. And who is to decide what gets deleted anyways? A democratically elected parliament? A company’s boss? And where does one draw the line between acceptable and inacceptable content? With its strategy of counterbalancing information, Google expertly solves these issues.