Facebook AI Is Reportedly Helping Terrorists Escape Murder

For many recent years, a lot of social media companies including Facebook have faced the appeal from the governments to manage extremist content better on their own platforms, even removing it if necessary. The appeal especially aims at the content that promotes terrorism.

Many of these companies have decided to move to artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to respond to the call. However, The Atlantic has recently conducted an investigation showing that in spite of their advantages, the AIs may become an efficient tool that helps terrorists to hide their scary crimes. More particularly, modern technology is removing important evidence by chance.

The Atlantic also gave a typical example of this case. In 2017, Facebook users saw a video capturing a terrorist who was monitoring the execution of 18 victims. After that, the famous platform deleted this video. However, its users had enough time to share it on the Internet.

The citizens all over the world analyzed the whole video and discovered the real position of the execution. It turned out that the case occurred in Libya and a commander of AI-Saiqa called Mahmoud Mustafa Busayf al-Werfalli was the one to order the execution.

To arrest Werfalli, a series of evidence and references were collected to earn a warrant. The above video on Facebook was one of those.

From 2017 to now, YouTube, Facebook, and many other social media platforms have kept improving their algorithms to filter the misleading content. The latest algorithms can now delete a countless number of extremist content on their own, even before users can see it.

Considering many aspects, these tech companies have obviously shown a part of their success. However, we may take into account the disappearance of evidence that can be used to put criminals, from terrorists, dictators, to warlords, in jail.