Social mediaFrance asks social media companies to help in fighting radicalization, terrorism

The French government has asked leading social media and tech firms, Google, Facebook, and Twitter to work directly with French law enforcement during investigations and to immediately remove terrorist propaganda when authorities alert them to it. “We emphasized that when an investigation is underway we don’t want to go through the usual government to government channels, which can take so long,” French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said after a meeting last Friday with representatives from the U.S. tech giants. “It’s important to have full cooperation and quick reaction” he added.

Cazeneuve’s visit comes after the January terror attacks in Paris, where jihadists went on a shooting spree killing seventeen people and injuring eleven more at the Charlie Hebdo office and at a kosher supermarket in Paris.

The Islamic State (ISIS), along with other Islamist militant groups, are using social media to disseminate their violent messages, recruit new followers and fighters, and share videos of executed hostages. Roughly 20,000 foreign fighters, including 3,400 from Western nations, have joined ISIS and other extremist groups in Syria and Iraq. According to the Christian Science Monitor, some 1,000 young Muslims between ages eighteen and twenty-nine years old come from France.

For its part, the French government has been blocking websites accused of promoting terrorism. In January the government hired fifty military experts to monitor jihadist activity on social media networks. France has also launched a Web site to provide information that counters radicalization and jihadist propaganda. “I told them we can figure this out together, we can come up with counter-terrorism speech and block these sites that are enticing the most vulnerable members of our society to commit terrorist acts,” Cazeneuve said of his conversations with U.S. tech firms.

Twitter and Facebook have said they constantly work to remove from their sites material that incites violence, and both firms have expressed their willingness to work with U.S. law enforcement, but they have not confirmed whether they would work directly with French authorities. “We review all reported content against our rules, which prohibit direct, specific threats of violence against others,” a twitter spokesperson wrote in an e-mail to theMonitor.

“We work aggressively to ensure that we do not have terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any content that praises or supports terrorism,” a Facebook spokesperson said last Friday.

Google removed fourteen million videos in 2014 for featuring gratuitous violence, incitement to violence, or hate speech; and within forty-five minutes of the Charlie Hebdo attack, Microsoft released to French officials content from e-mail accounts linked to the Kouachi brothers when they were suspected of being the killers. That request for e-mail content came through an emergency channel from French prosecutors to the FBI.

Still, tech companies will only go so far, considering the public pressure to put user privacy ahead of government surveillance. “Over the last three years, first Edward Snowden and now (ISIS), we have seen the political debate about government access to information swing from one end of the spectrum to the other,” said Rachel Whetstone, Google’s senior vice president of communications and public policy, in a speech to the Bavarian parliament earlier this month. “Given most people use the Internet for the reasons it was intended, we shouldn’t weaken security and privacy protections for the majority to deal with the minority who don’t.”