FB still studying if terror, crime suspect list will be made public
MANILA, Philippines—Social media giant Facebook said it was studying whether to make public a global list of individuals and organizations allegedly involved in crimes and terrorism.
Nawab Osman, head of Facebook’s Counter-Terrorism and Dangerous Organizations in the Asia Pacific, said the social media company has not released the list as the groups might try to find loopholes to get around it.
“They might get more sophisticated. They might try to circumvent our policies in order to have a presence,” he told journalists at an online briefing on Wednesday (Oct. 27).
Article continues after this advertisementA leak of the list, which included thousands of individuals and organizations, has been recently released by an American news organization.
“We agree that there’s more room for transparency. We are working on the best way to do this. making the list public potentially is one way, but it can cause problems,” Osman said.
“I’m not saying we will not make our list public. We might at some point, but there are many considerations before we make this public,” he said.
Article continues after this advertisementOrganizations and individuals suspected to be engaged in violence or terrorism are being assessed according to three tiers. These are being monitored through artificial intelligence and human reviewers.
Osman said Facebook had taken action on 99.7 percent of terrorism content and 97.8 percent of hate content.
But Facebook is recently under fire for supposedly failing to police abusive content among its billion users in countries vulnerable to harm and online propaganda.
A report by Reuters said that based on internal company documents, Facebook was aware that it hasn’t hired enough workers to identify objectionable posts from users in a number of developing countries.
