Google to show wrong search results to would-be Jihadis

“Isis is part of that, but it’s absolutely not the only extremist organization or behavior that we care about”, Milner said.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are among dozens of Silicon Valley companies that have come under pressure in recent years to help fight jihadi propaganda online. It also heard evidence from Twitter and Facebook, during a session that examined whether extremists used social media as a recruiting tool-as alarmed politicians sometimes like to define it. The home affairs panel challenged the Internet companies on whether they were doing enough to prevent their services from being “hijacked” by extremists.

Google Inc.’s United Kingdom users who search for extremism-related entries will be redirected to anti-radicalization links in a bid to counter online influence of religious fanaticism, a company executive told British lawmakers.

House – public policy and communications chief for the tax-dodging firm – said the company was pumping money into charity ads that would appear at the top of search results for extremist materials. “It doesn’t mean they don’t try [to upload content] so we want to share what we have learnt about how we have made Facebook a hostile place with other platforms”.

Google users searching for content related to extremism will be directed towards anti-radicalization pages in a pilot program, the Internet giant has announced. It will show results of anti-radicalisation, anti-extremism articles and posts, if someone searches with “potentially damaging search terms”. “The program enables NGOs to place counter-radicalization ads against search queries of their choosing”.

Twitter’s UK Public Policy Manager Nick Pickles told Parliament members that the social network has a team of more than 100 employees dedicated to removing violent, extremist, or otherwise inappropriate content from the site.

The three were also questioned about the thresholds they apply on notifying authorities about terrorist material identified by staff or users.

“We don’t proactively notify”, he said. We have initiated discussions on that matter and more generally on how extremist material can be taken down from such sites, and we will be progressing that work.

Dr House also told MPs that Google removed 14 million videos from YouTube in 2014 – many of them because of terrorist content.