Spotting And Culling Terrorist Groups On Social Media: Pipe Dream, or Possibility? (nytimes.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Can Twitter Spot Terrorists and Put Them In Jail? Hany Farid, the chairman of the Computer Science department at Dartmouth University, thinks so. He told the New York Times that there's "no fundamental technology or engineering limitation" to spotting terrorists on the Intertubes. In other words, he's figured out how to tell the difference between bragging terrorists and kids who are just joking about being "da bomb." Can artificial intelligence make these distinctions? Or will it generate a ton of false positives? Or is Prof. Farid just trolling for more grant money to make Dartmouth the premier department for spying on social media?

Comments

Anonymous Has Already Done This

[Nova Express]

At least at a certain level, with Anonymous taking out thousands of pro-Islamic State Twitter accounts with Operation Tango Down. Now that's just one service, and nothing prevents them from signing on again. But you can slow momentum and make it harder for supporters of terrorism to broadcast their views to supporters without reprisals, and also limit or prevent coordinated action.

Best of all, it's possible to do it merely for Terms of Service violation, without government action.

Of course, to actually defeat terrorists, you have to kill them faster than terror organizations can create new terrorists, and to dry up their financial support (of which the Islamic State has plenty in "moderate" Sunni states...)

Re:So, Donald Trump had a good idea?

[tiberus]

Uh, not just no.

There's an entire universe between the excrement that Trump spews and using AI, heuristics, machine learning, etc. to identify terrorists or more likely terrorist like behavior. If nothing else this would give humans searching for terrorists a place to start. It would be a constant arms race but, it is certainly worth the try.