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

Yes to one of these.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is Prof. Farid just trolling for more grant money

If you want an infinite pool of grant money in electrical engineering in the UK, you go for something with clear defence applications. I expect similar applies for IT.

What I find embarrassing in all this is that there is really nothing stopping thousands of people being shot every day by lone wolves except that people are generally not that shitty. And when there is propaganda to drive people to do horrific things that they would not normally do, it doesn't come from the DEEP DARK OMG WEB (you have to really want it in the first place to look hard for it there, by its very nature), but from regular media pounding the TV/radio/web sites with news about previous attacks and the threat of the enemy, marginalising and factionalising and dividing and conquering (while arms are sold to both sides, and politicians take great advantage).

Here's the thing: terrorism is not a big threat in Western nations. In fact, world violence is at a relative low. What is at the highest of highs, however, is the ability to quickly set the narrative for news, getting people to panic about all the appropriate things, then turning their attention to some new event to stop them reflecting too much.

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:Anonymous Has Already Done This

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that the game?

If this man could identify terrorist speech (i.e. speech from terrorists), then you'd use his software and arrest the terrorists and there would be no Paris and no San Bernadino. He has a computer, he has an Internet connection, there is nothing stopping him writing his software.... yet he hasn't.

Instead he (and you) define terrorists speech as different, e.g. "supporting or condoning groups you deem as terrorist", or speech from people you believe are supporter of terrorism.

But that's basically saying "I can make a filter to select X" and "I define X as what my filter chooses". So he doesn't plan to filter terrorist speech, he plans on selected a group of texts in a filter and DEFINING THAT as the terrorists speech he wants to stop.

Language is a funny thing, and language processing (e.g. for translation) is go awful, so of course he can't deliver on his promises, but he can define his promise to be what he delivers!

Re:Anonymous Has Already Done This

[Rei]

Unfortunately "violations for terms of service" is just as vulnerable to false positives. The other day I went to check out a video on Youtube and found out that it had been pulled for violation of the terms of service. Someone clearly glanced at it and saw screenshots all too familiar: a row of Daesh (ISIS) thugs in all black, their prisoners in orange jump suits before them forced to kneel, guns pointed to their head for an execution. Youtube has taken up a policy of banning such videos.

Except, that's not what the video was. The video was not from Daesh but Levant Front, an anti-Daesh coalition. The people in black were Levant Front members and the people in the orange jumpsuits Daesh solders that they had captured. And rather than execute them, they all holstered their guns, took off their face masks, and walked away, while an imam showed up and gave a sermon to the Daesh prisoners about forgiveness and being fair and just in life. In short, it was precisely the opposite of the Daesh videos that Youtube is supposed to ban.

False positives are a real thing.

Re:Anonymous Has Already Done This

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

See, terrorists WANT a war with the West. They WANT us to kill them - they have no fear of death because when they die, they are delusional enough to think that there is some sort of awesome afterlife when they die for their Jihad. It's religious fanaticism at its extreme. Every time the US or coalition forces kill terrorists, it is seen as an attack on Islam. And Muslims in other countries rush in to help their "Muslim Brothers".

So them Muslims (moderate or otherwise) would not distinguish between West's attempt to kill terrorists and West's attempts to wage war on Islam. But the West is expected to very carefully distinguish between terrorists and non-terrorists. And every mistake by West is yet another round of moderate Muslims condoning/justifying/excusing/tolerating/accepting more Muslims turning terrorists. Why is this double standard?

Even the moderate Muslims are not tolerating non Muslims doing things that are not binding on them. If someone draws the picture of Mohammad or Allah, the moderates are NOT saying, "that depiction is hurtful to our sentiments, please do not do it, but I do recognize your first amendment free speech rights to draw such pictures". They are saying "that depiction is hurtful to our sentiments, so some Muslims will kill you, they won't recognize your free speech first amendment rights, so please don't do it". What goes without being noticed is that the moderate Muslim is refusing to teach his extremist factions to recognize our first amendment rights.

One thing the West can do is to show the Muslims how to earn the real deep respect from the West by avoiding violence and confrontation. Hindus and Buddhists and native religions and pagan religions are not engaged in a war with the West. If Americans go out of their way to show obvious, open, highly publicized respect to these religions it would draw a contrast. It would allow the moderate Muslims to tell their extremists, "See how that pagan deity or that Buddhist temple is being congratulated, praised and respected by the Christians and the Jews of America! Islam is drawing hatred and violence only because of your terrorism!".

But even the atheists and secularists were showing extremely disrespectful depictions of Jesus, Moses, Ganesha and Abraham to show off the "tolerance" of these religions. What Muslim sees is not the "tolerance" of these religions but cowardice of them not defending their deities.

So, Donald Trump had a good idea?

[Nikkos]

The article below this one is full of 'Trump is an idiot' (and he is), but here in the next article we talk about using AI to cull posts.

'Closing up the internet in some way' would be akin to spotting and censoring a group of people's comments, yes? Effectively limiting their internet use, yes?

Potatoes, Potatos.

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.

Answers

[ZorroXXX]

Can Twitter Spot Terrorists and Put Them In Jail?

No.

Can artificial intelligence make these distinctions?

No.

Or will it generate a ton of false positives?

Yes.

Or is Prof. Farid just trolling for more grant money to make Dartmouth the premier department for spying on social media?

Yes.

As always, follow the money (or alternatively, he is incredible stupid and actually belives in it).

There is always an easy solution to every human problem -- neat, plausible, and wrong. -- H. L. Mencken,

Sure, spotting terrorists is easy.

[hey!]

... if you don't mind mis-identifying non-terrorists as terrorists.

It should be so obvious that it goes without saying, but the people who cobbled together things like the anti-terrorist watch lists after 9/11 didn't seem to grasp this: the wider you catch your net, the smaller proportion of what you haul out of the ocean is comprised of fish.

Re:Anything Is Possible . . .

[laird]

Ads can afford a low 'hit' rate, because the cost of being wrong is very low. A good ad gets a 3% response rate, meaning 97% of the time it's a "false positive", but it's still profitable because ads are dirt cheap (0.5 cents would be high) so if you make a few dollars on the 'hits' you can easily cover the misses. In counter-terrorism, each false positive requires detectives to work the lead, making them extremely expensive to pursue. That's why every data mining approach to counter-terrorism has failed so far - the cost of pursuing the false positives gives data mining leads negative value, because they pull resources away from more productive approaches.

But the government's non-technical management loves the idea, and keeps allocating money to it, and unscrupulous researchers will keep taking the money.

Enough!

[DriveDog]

Didn't BASIC come from Dartmouth? Haven't they caused enough damage already?