Interesting to see how your story with the pursuit of truth is also tangled up in Jihadism. While I cannot say that I am exceptionally well studied in Jihadism I spent a couple years studying it and even had a subreddit dedicated to investigating Jihadist content.
I remember to a write up in school on what was done specifically to counter…
Interesting to see how your story with the pursuit of truth is also tangled up in Jihadism. While I cannot say that I am exceptionally well studied in Jihadism I spent a couple years studying it and even had a subreddit dedicated to investigating Jihadist content.
I remember to a write up in school on what was done specifically to counter ISIS propaganda and one of the most shocking things to me looking back on it (I wrote this write up in 2022) was that social media companies were refusing to take down ISIS content due to Freedom of Speech concerns.
In 2014, Google and by extension YouTube took a stand and said they were not going to remove ISIS content from their platform because they considered it to be News and to remove it from their platform would be a suppression of Freedom of Speech. Twitter made a similar stand at the time.
Today something like this seem almost impossible to imagine, tech giants standing up for freedom of speech, not only of the reasonable man, but of the terrorist, of the unreasonable man.
Governments, and more importantly, advertisers, put pressure on the tech giants to start suppressing ISIS content, and one could only imagine the vast majority of the public agreed that this should be done. So the tech giants did start suppressing ISIS content. They created algorithms that learned to detect Jihadist language and ISIS iconography. These algorithms were highly effective. ISIS content went from a simple google search away to something you had to scour the internet for. We all saw this as a good thing. ISIS' physical caliphate eventually collapsed in 2019. ISIS was gone.
What was however not gone was the algorithms that were used to suppress ISIS content. These systems were not put on a shelf and left to collect dust but were instead harnessed to suppress content that was deemed "Not suitable for advertisers." Much like WW2 left us with a new super-weapon, the nuclear bomb, the war on ISIS left us with a new super-weapon, though this time the weapon did not destroy the homes or people, it destroyed *ideas*, and only time will tell how destructive such a weapon can be.
Interesting to see how your story with the pursuit of truth is also tangled up in Jihadism. While I cannot say that I am exceptionally well studied in Jihadism I spent a couple years studying it and even had a subreddit dedicated to investigating Jihadist content.
I remember to a write up in school on what was done specifically to counter ISIS propaganda and one of the most shocking things to me looking back on it (I wrote this write up in 2022) was that social media companies were refusing to take down ISIS content due to Freedom of Speech concerns.
In 2014, Google and by extension YouTube took a stand and said they were not going to remove ISIS content from their platform because they considered it to be News and to remove it from their platform would be a suppression of Freedom of Speech. Twitter made a similar stand at the time.
Today something like this seem almost impossible to imagine, tech giants standing up for freedom of speech, not only of the reasonable man, but of the terrorist, of the unreasonable man.
Governments, and more importantly, advertisers, put pressure on the tech giants to start suppressing ISIS content, and one could only imagine the vast majority of the public agreed that this should be done. So the tech giants did start suppressing ISIS content. They created algorithms that learned to detect Jihadist language and ISIS iconography. These algorithms were highly effective. ISIS content went from a simple google search away to something you had to scour the internet for. We all saw this as a good thing. ISIS' physical caliphate eventually collapsed in 2019. ISIS was gone.
What was however not gone was the algorithms that were used to suppress ISIS content. These systems were not put on a shelf and left to collect dust but were instead harnessed to suppress content that was deemed "Not suitable for advertisers." Much like WW2 left us with a new super-weapon, the nuclear bomb, the war on ISIS left us with a new super-weapon, though this time the weapon did not destroy the homes or people, it destroyed *ideas*, and only time will tell how destructive such a weapon can be.