💕💝Rupert Murdoch, The Islamic State, Heart Emoji’s and Tiktok- How Tech Companies are monitoring content in the face of increasingly tech savvy terrorists💘❤️
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50138740
This week, it was reported- originally by the Wall Street Journal that a string of posts across 24 Tik Tok accounts were associated with recruiting efforts by the Islamic State. If you’re anything like me, these news reports must be just as appalling to you as they were for me- for one, it dispels the fear imposed on me by my friends that I am missing out by not hopping on this TikTok thing. Secondly, the Islamic State really hasn’t been in the headlines for a while, and just when we thought they wouldn’t come back again, they did- and this time with an unforeseen instrument: the wholesome excessive heart emoji meme.
In all seriousness, the new postings have utilized elements of meme virality to bypass preliminary upload screens – lively anthem background songs, heart emojis, among other things. Something I didn’t know was there actually exists a shared database between tech giants like Youtube, Facebook, etc that stockpiles extremist terrorist content in order to aid parallel monitoring/automated moderation across social media platforms. This likely is the largest database of extremist content in the world. Another interesting fact was that a lot of social media companies contract the company Storyful a NewsCorp subsidiary to do a lot of media intelligence to the end of having risk and reputation monitoring services in place to handle things like these. Although the article was sparse in details about monitoring policies it is clear that having binary classifiers filter out extremist content just based on the content of the upload isn’t sufficient, and to aid the human monitoring team to best use their time to combat extremist content they do network analysis, namely looking at the patterns in subscriber activity and count and rank uploads in order to feed human monitors cases with high probability of rule-violation.