Silicon Valley executives will meet with top government officials in a private meeting tomorrow to eke out better strategies to counter the Islamic State’s online influence.
The meeting, first reported by Reuters, will put even more pressure on technology companies to crack down on ISIS’ social media recruiting and propaganda.
According to The Guardian, executives from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft will attend along with FBI Director James Comey, NSA Director Mike Rogers, NIA Director James Clapper, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.
The Guardian obtained a copy of the agenda for tomorrow’s meeting—and if they stick to the talking points, it should focus heavily on social media. Here are the “core discussion areas:”
a. How can we make it harder for terrorists to leveraging the internet to recruit, radicalize, and mobilize followers to violence?
b. How can we help others to create, publish, and amplify alternative content that would undercut ISIL?
c. In what ways can we use technology to help disrupt paths to radicalization to violence, identify recruitment patterns, and provide metrics to help measure our efforts to counter radicalization to violence?
d. How can we make it harder for terrorists to use the internet to mobilize, facilitate, and operationalize attacks, and make it easier for law enforcement and the intelligence community to identify terrorist operatives and prevent attacks?
Social media companies like Twitter and Facebook have already changed policies to broadly ban “terrorism,” and have removed ISIS-related content from their platforms. It’s not clear what other steps are available, especially since ISIS recruiters can create new accounts once their old ones get blocked (something readily apparent when you read the arrest report for Jalil Ibn Ameer Aziz, a Pennsylvania teen who used 57 Twitter accounts to spread pro-ISIS messages).
So far, the government’s counter-propaganda efforts on social media have been laughably bad—if anyone at Twitter can help the poor souls on the Think Again Turn Away team, they’ll be miracle workers.
Image by AP