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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

What Can — Or Should — Internet Companies Do To Fight Terrorism?

After the recent attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, social media platforms are under pressure from politicians to do more to take down messages and videos intended to promote terrorist groups and recruit new members.

Lawmakers in Congress are considering a bill that calls on President Obama to come up with a strategy to combat the use of social media by terrorist groups. Another measure, proposed in the Senate, would require Internet companies to report knowledge of terrorist activities to the government.

Obama himself has urged tech leaders to make it harder for terrorists "to use technology to escape from justice," and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has recently said that social media companies can help by "swiftly shutting down terrorist accounts, so they're not used to plan, provoke or celebrate violence."

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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Be careful what you wish for in censorship, politicians. Social media has been used more than once by the military and law enforcement to track down terrorists and criminals, both before and after their deeds. Monitoring is already going on. I would also hate to see this become a back door by which government can start controlling the Internet.

Just my 2 cents.

Anonymous said...

funniest thing is Hillary used a government email account to provoke violence. Amazing how they want to take guns from us but not interfere to much with social media.

Concerned retiree said...

If the IRS could target Conservatives with certain words or phrases, then the Tech companies should be able to target social media the same for messages with terrorist words or phrases. They don't want to because the contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to Liberals. This is pure CS (common sense)