Facebook can’t be trusted to stop spread of extremism, experts tell Senate

Authored by rollcall.com and submitted by rs16
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The failure of social media companies to contain the spread of violent extremist content on their platforms will continue to have deadly real-world consequences unless the government intervenes, a panel of internet watchdogs and academics told senators on Thursday.

Facebook, in particular, is responsible for spreading extremist content and fomenting domestic terrorism, including activity related to the “Stop the Steal” movement that led to the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the experts testified during a hearing of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

Karen Kornbluh, who directs the Digital Innovation and Democracy Initiative at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, described how social media algorithms can quickly lure a user from innocuous political content to instructional videos for forming a militia.

“This is a national security vulnerability,” Kornbluh said, giving a small number of content producers the ability to exploit social media algorithms to gain enormous reach.

“Social media goes well beyond providing users tools to connect organically with others,” she testified. “It pulls users into rabbit holes and empowers small numbers of extremist recruiters to engineer algorithmic radicalization.”

different_tom on November 1st, 2021 at 16:23 UTC »

Why is anyone expecting them to?

Possible-Unhappy on November 1st, 2021 at 15:34 UTC »

They can however be trusted to spread extremism effectively

RetroBowser on November 1st, 2021 at 15:29 UTC »

Facebook can't be trusted to do anything except make themselves money. That's why laws are created.

When there's no supervision and no rules, there'll always be a big guy trying to fuck over the little guy who's powerless to do anything, hence banding together and forming government.

At the end of the day people need to realize that businesses exist for two things: To have a customer base satisfied enough to stay, and to make money. Anything else you need to lay down the law and make sure they don't overstep trying to reach those goals.