Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook says that «like» can help stop the recruitments in ISIS
Just days after donating $31 million of her Facebook stock to various charities, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is back in the news for her latest advice on fighting ISIS. She says people should carry out “like attacks” to combat terrorism on the social network.
Answering a question regarding what Facebook could do to combat online recruitment and hate preaching of the Islamic State, Ms. Sandberg, the company's CEO, said it was almost impossible to prevent posts on the page, as she admits “as soon as one post goes down another immediately goes up”.
However, Sandberg advises users, to combat hate propaganda, to bomb these posts with “tolerance and messages of hope», and activists to like pages with hate sermons.
Sandberg provided very convincing evidence that likes can win. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, she said that a group in Germany called “Laut gegen Nazis,” an anti-neo-Nazi group, had attacked the far-right EAS Facebook page by liking and posting on the page.
“They launched a «like» attack on the Facebook page of NPD”, said. “Instead of shouting and protesting, they got 100,000 people to like the page, people who didn't like the page and wrote messages of tolerance, so when you entered the page, the content had changed and a page full of hatred and intolerance became a page of hope.”.
“The best antidote for bad speech is good speech and the best antidote to hatred is tolerance.”
Sandberg seems to have the right ideas for combating ISIS, but Facebook has long been accused of failing miserably to combat ISIS propaganda on the social media platform. But now it appears to be putting things right, even as it pledged to spend more than €1 million (£770,000) to support non-governmental organizations in tackling hate propaganda.
