Facebook has a 200-member counter-terrorism team to deal with objectionable and terrorist content. On the second day of testifying before the US senators, CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was questioned about the steps taken or being planned by Facebook to deal with data protection, opioid crisis and curbing of malicious and terrorist content.
Zuckerberg responded:
“The team is comprised of 200 people, who are focused on counter-terrorism. The content reviewers also go over flagged information. I think we have capacity in 30 languages that we are working on and in addition to that, we have a number of Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools that we are developing like the ones that I mentioned that can proactively go flag the content.”
Zuckerberg further said that the counter-terrorism team had designed systems, which helped to flag terrorist groups communication and removing their accounts automatically. Earlier, Facebook said that it has a team comprising of academic experts on counter-terrorism, former prosecutors, former law enforcement agents and analysts, and engineers.
The committee members also expressed concerns about the company’s targetted ad system and how it profited itself from users’ personal data. Zuckerberg clarified that:
“We only store them temporarily and we convert the weblogs into a set of ad interests that you might be interested in those ads, and we put that in the ‘download your information’ [feature] and you have complete control over that,” he said.
The Facebook CEO further said that Facebook would verify the identity and location of advertisers, who were running malicious political ads. The hearing took place after reports started pouring last month that the social networking site had compromised with the personal data of over 87 million Facebook users to Britain-based Cambridge Analytica which allegedly influenced voters during the 2016 US presidential election.
