Fighting terrorism with Facebook and Twitter

Congress wants social media sites to alert the government to possible terrorism activity, but some companies fear legislation could place too much responsibility on social networks to counter terrorism.

“The terrorism threat is very different today,” FBI director James Comey said to the Senate Intelligence Committee this month. “ISIL wants to kill people in their name and they are spreading that propaganda through Twitter and other parts of social media.”

A bipartisan bill introduced in March would require companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google to alert the government to terrorist activity on their sites. The alert would be similar to previous provisions that require networks to flag child pornography.

But tech officials have been lobbying against the bill, saying the requirements could lead to an overload of useless information and also put the blame on companies if online terrorism activity slips through the cracks.

The bill does not establish a clear consequence in the event of noncompliance or oversight of terrorism activity on a company’s network.

Monika Bickert, head of policy management at Facebook, said company policies on the matter have always been clear: “We remove this terrorist content as soon as we become aware of it.”

Comey told the committee Islamic State has more than 21,000 English-language followers on Twitter. He said its online message to the Western world is two-pronged: Go to the Middle East to join them, and if that’s not possible, kill somebody locally, preferably on videotape.

Over the past year, the Islamic State has recruited thousands of fighters, many from Western societies. “The internet is a medium that provides them with all the facilities they need to interact, to communicate, to recruit, and to seduce,” author Gabriel Weimann said in a June interview with the Wilson Center. Weimann published a book last month on the nature of cyberterrorism.

It is unclear when the Senate will vote on the bill. Policymakers are still reviewing details such as applicability, penalties, and other legal concerns for social media networks.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the bill’s sponsor, said when the bill was first introduced, “These are protocols which will help minimize the threat to the United States and also ensure that our citizens are less likely to experience the same scale of attacks.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.