Can We Finally Stop Terrorists From Exploiting Social Media?

Social media has a terrorism problem. From Twitter’s infamous 2015 proclamation that it would never censor a terrorist to Facebook’s long delay in adopting signature-based content blacklisting, social media has become a critical inadvertent ally in helping terror organizations throughout the globe recruit, communicate and promote. The platforms themselves have been slow to respond, initially rejecting calls to remove terrorists from their walled gardens, before reversing and aggressively embracing the idea of purging violent users. However, for all their public discourse, the platforms have taken little concrete action, reflecting both the economic realities that they have little incentive to invest in content moderation and the real-world complication that deleting terrorist content requires understanding context, not blindly deleting any post with a given keyword.