An anonymous whistle-blower complaint against Facebook to the US Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Facebook inadvertently facilitated militant and terror propaganda by auto-generating videos and pages consisting graphic violence, insurgency activity, logos, promotional videos and other propaganda. This complaint was first reported by AP News. The platform auto-generated 'Celebration' and 'Memories' videos for terrorists, hence promoting videos of terrorist iconography and graphic violence and insurgency activity. Further, the complaint shows the Facebook's current content moderation exercise is far from adequate, with terrorist content and propaganda easily slipping through its human and AI detection systems. Researchers monitored accounts and pages controlled by users who affiliated themselves with groups that the US State Department has declared as terrorist organizations, including ISIS and Al Qaeda. The researchers closely studied a dozen profiles who people on Facebook who identified themselves as terrorists, and further reviewed their (publicly accessible list of) 3,228 Friends to understand the spread of the network, "many openly identified as terrorists themselves and shared extremist content", and "openly shared images, posts, and propaganda of ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban and other known terror groups" says the complaint. Researchers say the ease of identifying these profiles using a basic keyword search was worrying. Facebook's auto-generated content promotes terror Facebook auto-generates “Local Business” pages for terrorist groups to support the job designations in some profiles that list the groups in their “work” experience. On those pages, Facebook also auto-filled terror icons, branding and flags that appear when a user searches for members…
