Social media companies are prioritizing making a profit over taking down harmful rhetoric that leads to violent extremists perpetuating the ideology, according to a Senate Homeland Security Committee report.
November 16, 2022, 3:03 PMSenator Gary Peters, a Democrat from Michigan and chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, during a hearing, Sept. 14, 2022 in Washington.U.S. social media companies are prioritizing making a profit over taking down harmful rhetoric that leads to violent extremists perpetuating the ideology, according to a Senate Homeland Security Committee report released on Wednesday.
"Anger is a particularly engaging emotion for folks," he said. "And as you keep providing, and these are algorithms that keep providing information to folks to keep them engaged and then often can go down a dark rabbit hole."He said social media companies have gotten better about taking the harmful content down.
Domestic attacks have been plotted on social media and "inspired by, content on social media," according to the report. The report gives example of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a gunman allegedly shot and killed African Americans in a grocery store and livestreamed it, according to the report.In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson said that the company, which is owned by Google, said "responsibility" is its top priority.
"Although Meta, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube have a range of policies aimed at addressing extremist and hateful content on their platforms and have taken steps to mitigate those harms through community guidelines language, human content moderation, and automated content moderation -- borderline, violative, and extreme content is still prevalent across these platforms," the report says.
First Amendment constraints make it so the agency cannot open an investigation solely on the basis of threats, but rather the connectivity of violence to that ideology make it fair game. In a statement to ABC News, the Department of Homeland Security pointed to the more than110 unclassified intelligence products related to domestic violent extremism, as well as six National Terrorism Advisory System bulletins the agency has sent out to partners around the country.
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