Facebook resorts to ‘like attacks’ on ISIS propaganda after losing censorship battle
Facebook has resorted to pleading with its members to drown out hate filled propaganda messages from ISIS members with love after conceding defeat in its efforts to take offensive material offline.
The switch in tactics will see people encouraged to mount ‘like attacks’ against pages professing support for the terror organisation after Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg admitted losing a game of whack-a-mole with terrorist sympathisers who simply post new messages for every disabled page or account.
Confusingly ‘like’ buttons have traditionally been used to signify approval of a given message but Sandberg believes that by clicking ‘like’ on negative posts as an indirect form of protest.
Sandberg has based her plan on a German Facebook campaign two years ago which saw 100,000 people ‘like’ a page set up on behalf of the far right National Democratic Party before posting messages of tolerance.
Sandberg said: “So when they went back to the page, they’ve completely changed the content and what was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then [full of] tolerance and messages of hope.”
Facebook has itself come in for stiff criticism over its handling of hate preachers and their acolytes online, including those seeking to groom impressionable youths with 150,000 people signing a petition criticising the social media platforms failure to stamp out the practice.