The terror group ISIS has been using social media platforms for various reasons like recruiting new members and sharing gory videos and images. This has led to various social networks actively weeding out accounts that are affiliated to the terror group.
Google is now the latest network that has decided to use its machinery in the online fight against ISIS. According to a report by the Guardian, Google’s senior manager for public policy and communications, Mr Antony House made remarks of the company’s plans to tackle extremism by ISIS:
“We should get the bad stuff down, but it’s also extremely important that people are able to find good information, that when people are feeling isolated, that when they go online, they find a community of hope, not a community of harm.”
Google has extensive online resources like its search engine and the most popular video repository. YouTube. House outlined the company’s plans to use this to fight ISIS:
“We are running two pilot programmes. One is to make sure that these types of videos are more discoverable on YouTube. The other one is to make sure when people put damaging search terms into our search engine, they also find this counter narrative.
That is not all. Google is also using its Ad Words platform where non profit organization will run ads that are against search queries related to terrorism.
ISIS sure has made a lot of enemies online where platforms like Telegram Messenger have banned accounts related to them, Twitter has a dedicated team that tracks and takes down their accounts and not forgetting Facebook too. We have also seen cases like the infamous Anonymous hacktivist group who took down suspected ISIS Twitter accounts after the Paris attacks and the US government using social media activity to track and destroy a premise that was linked to ISIS.
