Facebook Takes Action As Terrorists Found Using Platform To Recruit And Campaign

"When terrorists misuse the internet," Facebook explained in a blog post on Wednesday, July 24, "they often upload the same piece of content to multiple platforms to maximize their reach." This has allowed the social media giant—along with Google, Microsoft and Twitter under the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) alliance—to "more quickly identify and take action against potential terrorist content on our respective platforms."
In 2018, the alliance reached its intended milestone of assembling 100,000 such hashes. In the first half of 2019, though, the number has already doubled. There are now "more than 200,000 unique hashes in the database," each of which is described as a digital fingerprint pointing to a known piece of terrorist content.
The scale speaks for itself, as does news from the frontline.
Israel's internal security agency Shin Bet accused Iran this week of sponsoring a social media campaign to recruit individuals in Israel "for the benefit of Iranian intelligence." According to reports, the would-be recruits were asked to gather information on the ground to help prepare terrorist attacks. Such targets included military and civilian locations. In a statement (also on Wednesday, July 24), Shin Bet said "the vast majority of Israeli citizens refused to cooperate, because they suspected it was a hostile element and cut off contact with them—security forces will continue to act with determination to thwart any activity by Iran and terrorist elements acting on its behalf against the security of the state."
Shin Bet claimed the Iranian-backed campaign was orchestrated from Syria, under the guise of an individual known as Abu-Jihad, who used fake Facebook profiles and sought to entice target individuals onto messaging applications. There had already been arrests in Israel in recent months following the use of social media to recruit on behalf of Hezbollah and Hamas. "Using social networks," Shin Bet said in a statement following this latest counter-terrorist operation, "is a method known to intelligence agencies as being used by terrorist organizations, including Hamas and Hezbollah, to recruit activists." 

The same day, Wednesday, July 24, a court in Abu Dhabi sentenced a Filipino man to 10 years imprisonment for "promoting the ideology of terrorist organizations" through social media channels—primarily Facebook. According to local media, the charges included "setting up and running accounts on social media, including a Twitter account called 'Abu Zubair', five accounts on Facebook with different names and a seventh account on Telegram—all urging young people to join terrorist groups and to provide financial support to their members and affiliates around the world."
Although all the major social media platforms have come under increasing pressure in recent months for their inability to curtail content and engagement that promotes illegal terrorist activity, Facebook finds itself the leader of the pack. It is a role that has always been there, given its scale, reach and levels of engagement, but it reached new levels of public scrutiny after the attacks earlier this year in Christchurch.
At the G20 summit in Osaka last month, a statement was proposed by Australia and signed by all member-states, "urging online platforms to meet our citizens’ expectations that they must not allow the use of their platforms to facilitate terrorism and violent extremism conducive to terrorism."

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2019/07/25/facebook-steps-up-fight-against-terrorists-using-platform-to-recruit-and-campaign/#79e7c46341cf