A petition asking Facebook to introduce measures against Islamic State propaganda

After the Paris attacks, Internet users have launched a petition asking Facebook to introduce measures against Islamic State activities and supporters. The petition, signed by 150,000 within the first two weeks, requests the company to introduce algorithms and methods used for censoring porn and violence to also prevent the ISIS propaganda posts. In its response to the petition, Facebook reassured that terrorism should not have place within its network, confirming that they already combat it through relying on “1.5 billion users to alert when accounts or pro ISIS contents are posted”. Experts explain that filtering out such content is not easy and can’t (yet) be conducted automatically by an algorithm without also censoring the useful posts related to the issue or using same key words.