Reynaldo Gonzalez's daughter, Nohemi, was among the 130 people killed in last year's Paris attacks. Now, R. Gonzalez is suing Twitter, Facebook and Google for facilitating the spread of "extremist propaganda," alleging that the three social networks "knowingly" allowed ISIS to recruit, raise money and spread its messages on each of the platforms.
According to court documents:
“For years, [Twitter, Facebook and Google] have known and allowed the terrorist group ISIS to use their social media as a tool to spread extremist propaganda, raise funds and recruit new members.
This support has contributed to the rise of ISIS, which has the ability to carry out many terrorist attacks, including the attacks in Paris on November 13, 2015, where more than 125 people were killed, including Ms. Nohemi Gonzalez.”
Gonzalez claims that without Twitter, Facebook, and Google's YouTube, extremists would not have the infrastructure to get their message across to the masses.
Lawsuits like these are particularly worrisome, as any company can go to extremes by policing its members and removing offensive content.
Having a large team of moderators to oversee hundreds of millions of posts and generally new content every day is something that large companies have a hard time doing.
The difficulty, of course, lies in the volume of content, but also in the fact that no company can rely on the judgment of each mod as mod does not mean omniscient.
Currently, companies use random manual review, flagging offensive content to improve the bot algorithm with AI. But bot scans that often uncover inappropriate content still require human review.
Of course, as AI technology continues to improve, we will see fewer instances of extremist and other offensive posts.
For now, think of it as the price of entry to an open Web.
