Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Says People Should Use ‘Likes’ to Stop ISIS

The Islamic State has used social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to recruit members and rally their supporters, and tech companies are thinking about ways to fight back.
Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Says People Should Use ‘Likes’ to Stop ISIS
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The Islamic State has used social media networks like Twitter and Facebook to recruit members and rally their supporters, and tech companies are thinking about ways to fight back.

Earlier this month, executives from Apple, Facebook, and Twitter met with White House officials in a summit to discuss how to combat terrorism, the Guardian reports.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg discussed one way that users could fight terrorist groups online: with “like” attacks.

Sandberg gave an example of where German uses swarmed a neo-Nazi page on Facebook with likes and positive messages, the Guardian reports.

“What was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then tolerance and messages of hope,” she said, and applied that model to ISIS.

“The best thing to speak against recruitment by ISIS are the voices of people who were recruited by ISIS, understand what the true experience is, have escaped and have come back to tell the truth. ... Counter-speech to the speech that is perpetuating hate we think by far is the best answer.”

Jonathan Zhou
Jonathan Zhou
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Jonathan Zhou is a tech reporter who has written about drones, artificial intelligence, and space exploration.
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