FACEBOOK like many other social media platforms, has become the new arena where violence, hate, and espousing advocacies that endanger the lives of people online but also offline is happening. Facebook however is the most widespread and in the Philippines, comprise 96 percent of all online activities of Filipinos.
Since social media happens in real-time and is so proliferate, calls for violence can have a serious impact on the entities targeted.
To prevent and stop real-world harm, Facebook recently introduced to the media how it uses both artificial intelligence and human intervention to disrupt vicious online attacks against individuals, peoples, communities, organizations or even whole nations. At a virtual gathering, it introduced “Under the Hood-Dangerous Orgs,” a Facebook event primarily aimed at presenting the various ways the social media giant assesses certain entities based on their behavior both online and offline, most significantly, their ties to violence.
The objective of this assessment is to stop individuals, organizations, and networks of people who have been determined to attack or do violence in both the virtual and physical worlds. Facebook has employed several actions including classification by the kind and extent of harm these entities may do.
Humans, aided by artificial intelligence analyzing algorithms, reports, and text strings or patterns of words or images designate tiers these individuals, organizations, and networks of people with tier one being the highest, requiring extensive enforcement because these entities have the most direct ties to offline harm.
According to Facebook, Tier 1 focuses on entities that engage in serious offline harms–including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics including race, religious affiliation, national origin, disability, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, or serious disease, or engaging in systematic criminal operations.
Tier 1 entities include terrorist, hate, and criminal organizations. Statements like “Donate to the Ku Klux Klan (a white supremacist group in the US) or “I Support the Destruction of (person or entity)” are examples. FB removes praise, substantive support, and representation of Tier 1 entities as well as their leaders, founders, or prominent members.
Individuals and organizations that substantively supports or represents ideologies that promote hate, such as neo-Nazism and white supremacy, fall under this category. Groups that attack cultural minorities in the Philippines or those of those calling for the removal of the Rohingyas in Myanmar are examples of these organizations. In this same category, FB tags and removes comments or posts that praise and promote violent events such as terrorist attacks, hate events, multiple-victim violence or attempted multiple-victim violence, multiple murders, or hate crimes.
Tier 2 focuses on entities that engage in violence against state or military actors but do not generally target civilians also known as “violent non-state actors,” by removing substantive support, including congratulatory and praises as well as representation of these entities, their leaders, and their prominent members.
Repeated violations of hate speech is the focus of Tier 3. If a person or a group demonstrates strong intent to engage in offline violence in the near future (including open threats to an individual), but have not necessarily engaged in violence to date or advocated for violence against others based on their protected characteristics. This includes Militarized Social Movements (MSMs), like the ISIS, Violence-Inducing Conspiracy Networks (VICNs), and even trolls, if their actions falls into this category.
Some FB accounts of local militia and militant armed groups have disguised themselves behind other names such as Moros of the East and Liberate Philippines. The definition of MSMs also include non-state actors that use weapons as a part of their training, communication, or presence; and are structured or operate as unofficial military or security forces, coordinate, promoting, admitting to, or engage in acts of street violence against civilians or law enforcement, arson, looting, or other destruction of property and in preparation for the 2022 elections threaten to violently disrupt an election process, including promoting the possession and even use of weapons to a location when the stated intent is to intimidate people amid a protest.
VICN on the other hand, is defined as a non-state actor that organizes under a name, sign, mission statement, or symbol; and promotes theories that attribute violent or dehumanizing behavior to people or organizations that have been debunked by credible sources. These groups or individuals also inspire multiple incidents of real-world violence by adherents motivated by the desire to draw attention to or redress the supposed harms promoted by these debunked theories.
