Tambuling Batangas Publication May 15-21, 2019 Issue | Page 5

OPINYON
May 15-21, 2019
MMDA urges film producers to submit
“quality, innovative” entries for 45th MMFF
By Susan G. De Leon
QUEZON
CITY--The
Metropolitan Manila Development
Authority (MMDA), the organizer
of the Metro Manila Film Festival
(MMFF), is urging film producers
to submit “quality and innovative”
film entries that will make Filipinos
proud.

In a press briefing
held Monday at the MMDA
headquarters in Makati, MMDA
and concurrent MMFF Chairman
Danilo Lim said they are hoping
to receive quality and innovative
entries to this year’s MMFF –
excellent stories that will capture
the hearts not only of many
Filipinos but also the international
audience.

During
the
event,
Lim praised last year’s entry
“Rainbow’s Sunset” that made it
Facebook inadvertently creates jihad videos
WASHINGTON — The animated video
begins with a photo of the black flags of
jihad. Seconds later, it flashes highlights
of a year of social media posts: plaques of
anti-Semitic verses, talk of retribution and
a photo of two men carrying more jihadi
flags while they burn the stars and stripes.

It wasn’t produced by
extremists; it was created by Facebook.
In a clever bit of self-promotion, the
social media giant takes a year of a user’s
content and auto-generates a celebratory
video. In this case, the user called himself
“Abdel-Rahim Moussa, the Caliphate.”
“Thanks for being here, from Facebook,”
the video concludes in a cartoon bubble
before flashing the company’s famous
“thumbs up.”

Facebook likes to give the
impression that it’s staying ahead of
extremists by taking down their posts,
often before users even see them. But a
confidential whistleblower’s complaint to
the Securities and Exchange Commission
obtained by The Associated Press alleges
the social media company has exaggerated
its success. Even worse, it shows that the
company is inadvertently making use of
propaganda by militant groups to auto-
generate videos and pages that could be
used for networking by extremists.

According to the complaint,
over a five-month period last year,
researchers monitored pages by users
who affiliated themselves with groups the
U.S. State Department has designated as
terrorist organizations. In that period, 38%
of the posts with prominent symbols of
extremist groups were removed.

In its own review, the AP
found that as of this month, much of the
banned content cited in the study — an
execution video, images of severed heads,
propaganda honoring martyred militants
— slipped through the algorithmic web
and remained easy to find on Facebook.
The complaint is landing as Facebook
tries to stay ahead of a growing array of
criticism over its privacy practices and its
ability to keep hate speech, live-streamed
murders and suicides off its service.

In the face of criticism, CEO
Mark Zuckerberg has spoken of his
pride in the company’s ability to weed
out violent posts automatically through
artificial intelligence. During an earnings
call last month, for instance, he repeated
a carefully worded formulation that
Facebook has been employing.

“In areas like terrorism, for
al-Qaida and ISIS-related content, now
99 percent of the content that we take
down in the category our systems flag
proactively before anyone sees it,” he
said. Then he added: “That’s what really
good looks like.”

Zuckerberg did not offer an
estimate of how much of total prohibited
material is being removed.

The research behind the SEC
complaint is aimed at spotlighting glaring
flaws in the company’s approach. Last
year, researchers began monitoring users
who explicitly identified themselves as
members of extremist groups. It wasn’t
hard to document. Some of these people
even list the extremist groups as their
employers.

One profile heralded by the
black flag of an al-Qaida affiliated group
listed his employer, perhaps facetiously,
as Facebook. The profile that included the
auto-generated video with the flag burning
also had a video of al-Qaida leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri urging jihadi groups not to
fight among themselves.

While the study is far from
comprehensive — in part because
Facebook rarely makes much of its
data publicly available — researchers
involved in the project say the ease of
identifying these profiles using a basic
keyword search and the fact that so few
of them have been removed suggest that
Facebook’s claims that its systems catch
most extremist content are not accurate.

“I mean, that’s just stretching
the imagination to beyond incredulity,”
says Amr Al Azm, one of the researchers
involved in the project. “If a small group
of researchers can find hundreds of pages
of content by simple searches, why can’t
a giant company with all its resources do
it?”

Al Azm, a professor of history
and anthropology at Shawnee State
University in Ohio, has also directed a
group in Syria documenting the looting
and smuggling of antiquities.
Facebook concedes that its systems
are not perfect, but says it’s making
improvements.

“After
making
heavy
investments, we are detecting and
removing terrorism content at a far higher
success rate than even two years ago,” the
company said in a statement. “We don’t
claim to find everything and we remain
vigilant in our efforts against terrorist
groups around the world.”

But as a stark indication of how
easily users can evade Facebook, one page
from a user called “Nawan al-Farancsa”
has a header whose white lettering against
a black background says in English “The
Islamic State.” The banner is punctuated
with a photo of an explosive mushroom
cloud rising from a city.

The profile should have caught
the attention of Facebook — as well as
counter-intelligence agencies. It was
created in June 2018, lists the user as
coming from Chechnya, once a militant
hotspot. It says he lived in Heidelberg,
Germany, and studied at a university in
Indonesia. Some of the user’s friends also
posted militant content.

The page, still up in recent
days, apparently escaped Facebook’s
systems, because of an obvious and
long-running evasion of moderation that
Facebook should be adept at recognizing:
The letters were not searchable text
but embedded in a graphic block. But
the company says its technology scans
audio, video and text — including when
it is embedded — for images that reflect
violence, weapons or logos of prohibited
groups.

The social networking giant
has endured a rough two years beginning
in 2016, when Russia’s use of social
media to meddle with the U.S. presidential
elections came into focus.
Zuckerberg
initially
downplayed the role Facebook played
in the influence operation by Russian
intelligence, but the company later
apologized.

Facebook says it now employs
30,000 people who work on its safety and
security practices, reviewing potentially
harmful material and anything else that
might not belong on the site.

Still, the company is putting a
lot of its faith in artificial intelligence and
its systems’ ability to eventually weed out
bad stuff without the help of humans. The
new research suggests that goal is a long
way away and some critics allege that the
company is not making a sincere effort.

When the material isn’t
removed, it’s treated the same as anything
else posted by Facebook’s 2.4 billion
users — celebrated in animated videos,
linked and categorized and recommended
by algorithms.

But it’s not just the algorithms
that are to blame. The researchers found
that some extremists are using Facebook’s
“Frame Studio” to post militant
propaganda. The tool lets people decorate
their profile photos within graphic
frames — to support causes or celebrate
birthdays, for instance. Facebook says that
those framed images must be approved by
the company before they are posted.

Hany
Farid,
a
digital
forensics expert at the University of
California, Berkeley, who advises the
Counter-Extremism Project, a New York
and London-based group focused on
combatting extremist messaging, says that
Facebook’s artificial intelligence system
is failing. He says the company is not
motivated to tackle the problem because
it would be expensive.

“The whole infrastructure is
fundamentally flawed,” he said. “And
there’s very little appetite to fix it because
what Facebook and the other social media
companies know is that once they start
being responsible for material on their
platforms it opens up a whole can of
worms.”
Another
Facebook
auto-generation
function gone awry scrapes employment
information from user’s pages to create
business pages. The function is supposed
to produce pages meant to help companies
network, but in many cases they are
serving as a branded landing space for
extremist groups. The function allows
Facebook users to like pages for extremist
organizations, including al-Qaida, the
Islamic State group and the Somali-based
big at the 52nd Annual World Fest
in Houston, Texas recently.
He recognized the team behind
the film for making Filipinos,
particularly, the local film industry
proud while at the same time
pose a challenge to succeeding
production outfits that will join the
film festival this year.

“I hope that this will not
be the first and last time that we
will win big in international film
festivals and there will be more
success in the future,” Lim said.

“The MMDA and the
MMFF will continue to back up
our local films and filmmakers
for the Philippines to have its
rightful place in global filmmaking
industry,” Lim said. According to Lim, the MMFF
is gearing up for a “double
celebration” this year with the
commemoration of its 45th
anniversary, which coincides with
the centenary of Philippine cinema.

“We have big plans for
MMFF, not only during December
but all-year-round so we are
holding seminars and caravans to
develop talents of more students,”
said Lim.

The
deadline
for
submission of entries on script
format for this year’s film fest is on
May 31; deadline for Short Film
Student Competition entries is on
July 15; and entries for finished
film format is on September 20.
(PIA InfoComm/MMDA)
al-Shabab, effectively providing a list of
sympathizers for recruiters.

At the top of an auto-generated
page for al-Qaida in the Arabian
Peninsula, the AP found a photo of the
damaged hull of the USS Cole, which
was bombed by al-Qaida in a 2000 attack
off the coast of Yemen that killed 17 U.S.
Navy sailors. It’s the defining image in
AQAP’s own propaganda. The page
includes the Wikipedia entry for the group
and had been liked by 277 people when
last viewed this week.

As part of the investigation
for the complaint, Al Azm’s researchers
in Syria looked closely at the profiles of
63 accounts that liked the auto-generated
page for Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, a group
that merged from militant groups in
Syria, including the al-Qaida affiliated
al-Nusra Front. The researchers were able
to confirm that 31 of the profiles matched
real people in Syria. Some of them turned
out to be the same individuals Al Azm’s
team was monitoring in a separate project
to document the financing of militant
groups through antiquities smuggling.

Facebook also faces a
challenge with U.S. hate groups. In
March, the company announced that it
was expanding its prohibited content
to also include white nationalist and
white separatist content— previously it
only took action with white supremacist
content. It says that it has banned more
than 200 white supremacist groups. But
it’s still easy to find symbols of supremacy
and racial hatred.

The researchers in the SEC
complaint identified over 30 auto-
generated pages for white supremacist
groups, whose content Facebook prohibits.
They include “The American Nazi Party”
and the “New Aryan Empire.” A page
created for the “Aryan Brotherhood
Headquarters” marks the office on a map
and asks whether users recommend it.
One endorser posted a question: “How
can a brother get in the house.”

Even supremacists flagged
by law enforcement are slipping through
the net. Following a sweep of arrests
beginning in October, federal prosecutors
in Arkansas indicted dozens of members
of a drug trafficking ring linked to the
New Aryan Empire. A legal document
from February paints a brutal picture of
the group, alleging murder, kidnapping
and intimidation of witnesses that in
one instance involved using a searing-
hot knife to scar someone’s face. It also
alleges the group used Facebook to
discuss New Aryan Empire business.
But many of the individuals named in
the indictment have Facebook pages that
were still up in recent days. They leave
no doubt of the users’ white supremacist
affiliation, posting images of Hitler,
swastikas and a numerical symbol of the New Aryan Empire slogan, “To The Dirt”
— the members’ pledge to remain loyal
to the end. One of the group’s indicted
leaders, Jeffrey Knox, listed his job as
“stomp down Honky.” Facebook then
auto-generated a “stomp down Honky”
business page.

Social
media
companies
have broad protection in U.S. law from
liability stemming from the content that
users post on their sites. But Facebook’s
role in generating videos and pages from
extremist content raises questions about
exposure. Legal analysts contacted by
the AP differed on whether the discovery
could open the company up to lawsuits.

At a minimum, the research
behind the SEC complaint illustrates
the company’s limited approach to
combatting online extremism. The
U.S. State Department lists dozens of
groups as “designated foreign terrorist
organizations” but Facebook in its public
statements says it focuses its efforts on
two, the Islamic State group and al-
Qaida. But even with those two targets,
Facebook’s algorithms often miss the
names of affiliated groups. Al Azm says
Facebook’s method seems to be less
effective with Arabic script.

For instance, a search in Arabic
for “Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula”
turns up not only posts, but an auto-
generated business page. One user listed
his occupation as “Former Sniper” at “Al-
Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula” written in
Arabic. Another user evaded Facebook’s
cull by reversing the order of the countries
in the Arabic for ISIS or “Islamic State of
Iraq and Syria.”

John Kostyack, a lawyer
with the National Whistleblower Center
in Washington who represents the
anonymous plaintiff behind the complaint,
said the goal is to make Facebook take a
more robust approach to counteracting
extremist propaganda.

“Right now we’re hearing
stories of what happened in New Zealand
and Sri Lanka — just heartbreaking
massacres where the groups that came
forward were clearly openly recruiting and
networking on Facebook and other social
media,” he said. “That’s not going to stop
unless we develop a public policy to deal
with it, unless we create some kind of
sense of corporate social responsibility.”

Farid, the digital forensics
expert, says that Facebook built its
infrastructure without thinking through
the dangers stemming from content and is
now trying to retrofit solutions.

“The policy of this platform
has been: ‘Move fast and break things.’
I actually think that for once their motto
was actually accurate,” he says. “The
strategy was grow, grow, grow, profit,
profit, profit and then go back and try to
deal with whatever problems there are.”
A Facebook page for user Ramadan kareem, that when translated into English lists the user as working at "Islamic State in Sham and
Iraq." The page was still live Tuesday, May 7, 2019, when the screen grab was made. Facebook says it has robust systems in place to
remove content from extremist groups, but a sealed whistleblower's complaint reviewed by the AP says banned content remains on the
web and easy to find. (Facebook via AP)