How The War On Child Porn Is Helping Us Fight ISIS Propaganda

How can the U.S. fight the spread of Islamic State propaganda? The militant group’s infamous videos of beheadings, violence and torture have a dangerous allure for would-be radicals, and they proliferate over social media in a way that can make containment seem hopeless. But fighting extremist content online need not be very complicated, according to Dr. Hany Farid, a computer scientist at Dartmouth College. “We don’t need to develop software that determines whether a video is jihadist,” Farid recently told The Huffington Post. “Most of the ISIS videos in circulation are reposts of content someone has already flagged as problematic.” “We can easily remove that redistributed content,” he went on, “which makes a huge dent in their propaganda’s influence.” Farid is referring to a technique called “hashing,” which he pioneered nearly a decade ago while battling a different but equally vile online scourge: child pornography. Hashing involves scanning the unique digital fingerprint, or “hash,” of a video or photo, making it easy to find instances of that content and remove it. Last month, it was reported that Facebook and YouTube might start using this technique to automatically scour extremist content from their platforms. If they do, they will be taking a page from Farid’s book. In 2008 and 2009, Farid developed PhotoDNA, a hashing software that helped ide...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news