Facebook Says 99% of IS and Al Qaeda Content Spotted by AI

Facebook’s artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly adept at keeping terrorist content off the social network, the company has said, according to Bloomberg.

Today, 99 percent of Islamic State and Al Qaeda-related content Facebook removes is detected by the company’s AI before any user flags it, Monika Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, and Brian Fishman, head of counter-terrorism policy, said. They added that in some cases the software was able to block the content from ever being posted in the first place.

The executives cautioned that Facebook’s automated solutions are still imperfect, however. “A system designed to find content from one terrorist group may not work for another because of language and stylistic differences in their propaganda,“ they said.

As a result, Facebook said it had concentrated its efforts on IS and Al Qaeda, “the terrorist groups that pose the biggest threat globally.“ Facebook hopes to eventually expand its automated tools to target content from other, more regionally-focused terrorist organizations too, according to the executives.