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

Company says large number of human reviewers still needed

The Facebook Inc. logo is reflected in the eyeglasses of a user in this arranged photo in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011. Facebook Inc., the biggest social-networking company, is working to fix a security flaw that let people view other users' private photos, including those of Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg.

Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Provide news feedback or report an error

Confidential tip?

Send a tip to our reporters

Site feedback:

Take our Survey

By Jeremy Kahn

November 29, 2017 at 12:01 AM UTC

Updated on

November 29, 2017 at 9:22 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

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

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 Wednesday. They said 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.