Whitney Mallett
June 22, 2014
Terror Organizations’ Search Optimization Problem Is Our Problem Too
ISIS has as been as ruthless on the web as it’s been in taking over Iraq. The organization’s online campaign has been noted for its gruesome propaganda and slick pseudo-corporate image, along with English-language materials that target a global audience and savvy social media strategies that elude spam-detecting algorithms. The Sunni extremist group’s aggressive online initiatives, however, also raise questions of what responsibility social media and tech companies have to stymie a violent terror group’s proliferation and/or inform the public of its brutality.
Since ISIS seized control of Iraq’s second-largest city Mosul, Twitter has suspended accounts affiliated with the extremist group while the Iraq Ministry of Communications has shutdown access to major social media sites, and in some provinces, access to the internet altogether, purportedly to stop the group from organizing. To get around the blocks, downloads of VPN hotspot shields in the country have spiked, and in response to the news, so have searches for the term “isis” internationally.
The Twitter suspensions have stoked the most debate. The site suspended an account with a seven-figure following @Nnewsi which live tweeted the insurgents’ advance on Mosul and five other ISIS-affiliated accounts, as reported by Buzzfeed. Twitter’s response wasn’t totally unprecedented. Also suspended were Al Shabaab accounts during the Kenyan shopping mall attack in 2013. Still, Wikileaks officially denounced the censorship while others like the Wire’s Adam Chandler asked if it was savvy to prevent the mass dispersion of the images of the horrendous crimes, mass executions, and beheadings that have the potential to make people millions of miles away actually care about the atrocities going on. Chandler, though, only asked if it would be better for the assumed anti-terror cause for Twitter to suspend the accounts, without delving into the complications of 21st century media intervention.
The ethical responsibilities have changed along with technology. Now the dilemma of whether to show gruesome images on the evening news is complicated by the fact that the channels through which we learn of the atrocities are the same as the ones the groups committing them use to organize and proselytize. And instead of TV executives selecting what makes primetime, algorithms are playing a role in what we see first and foremost.
ISIS has taken advantage of these algorithms. The group’s Arabic-language app Dawn automatically tweets from its subscribers’ accounts in a strategically timed way that avoids Twitter’s spam detection filters. By flooding the microblogging site with the same images and hashtags, its content makes trending lists and the first pages of certain searches. Twitter has yet to block the content coming from these third-party apps via supporters’ accounts.
The other automated formulas controlling what we know about ISIS are the search optimization algorithms. Although searches for the term “isis” have spiked in the past weeks according to Google Trends, the search engine seemed slow to react. Until early Saturday morning at around 12:30am, 11 days after Mosul was captured, if I searched “isis” nothing of the Sunni extremist group making headlines for its violent slaughters and ambitions to establish a caliphate beyond national borders turned up—Visa’s Isis Wallet™ (looking like a terrible PR move now), Isis the Egyptian goddess, Isis pharmaceuticals, as well as the Institutional Species Information System, and the Institute for Science and International Security all beat it out. (About the same was true for searches on DuckDuckGo, while Yahoo and Bing had viral newsy trash about the insurgent ISIS mixed in.) Something changed with Google, though. As I write this, “isis” now results in news headlines about the group’s advance on Baghdad jumping the line—CNN, then the Daily Beast, then the Washington Post.
Did the search engine intervene or did its algorithms finally catch up to the headlines? And if the algorithms are lagging, do they have a responsibility to upmanipulate quality reference materials? Where is the line between Google predicting what I want to know and telling me what they think I should know? Based on my location and browsing history, do they think I’m looking for a Wikipedia page or Isis’s own propaganda? And what if I was in Iraq and not America? Would the group’s own promotional materials jump the line ahead of a trademarked Visa product? What if I was a regular Jihad forum user in London?
Filter bubbles, the selective filtering of results based on my location and web behavior, control our access to certain information subtly while the Iraq Ministry of Communications’ regional restrictions are impossible to miss. The prior might be more dangerous because of its inconspicuousness. The latter is easy enough to circumvent. Anchorfree, one of the companies hocking a popular VPN Hotspot shield that bypasses blocks, reported experiencing a ten-fold increase in downloads following the blocks. It had around 16,000 daily users on average before, and have 164,000 on average currently. The Iraq Ministry’s ban is attempting to debilitate ISIS’s activity. Presumably, some of the thousands using Anchorfree’s circumvention tool include ISIS members, as well as citizens who are victims of their terror. To which of its consumers is the private tech company responsible? All?
The violence in Iraq only seems to be escalating. A conflict with its roots in the seventh century is redefining the ethical responsibilities of 21st-century tech companies. Open channels of communications are tools of war, its resistance, and they provide human contact in times of unrest. As images of thousands being marched to their deaths, severed heads, and child soldiers make their way online, it’s clear the stakes right now are very grave.
No comments:
Post a Comment