Battling Terrorism Through Social Media

Facebook has announced a new partnership with Twitter, Microsoft and YouTube to battle the use of social media by terrorists. The new innovative program will be launched in early 2017. The companies will create a database of unique digital “fingerprints” to help automatically identify terrorist videos or images that will facilitate quick identification of the worst terrorist propaganda and prevent it from spreading online. I have long called for these precise reforms through legislation and other means. 

This new partnership between some of the world’s foremost media and technology companies marks a bold, new step in our battle against the cancer of radical Islamic terrorism that has been compounded by the ubiquitous reach of the internet. The terrorists have exploited the internet to spread their hateful ideas throughout the world and recruit more vulnerable people to their murderous ranks. This new initiative will hopefully mark a turning point in the battle of ideas by making it that much harder for terrorists to  use the internet as a loudspeaker for their evil.