Alex Krasodomski

Monitoring social media is easier said than done

The three British girls who packed their bags and took a flight to Turkey have apparently crossed the border into Syria. Their intention seems to be to join the Islamic State and it looks like they may have succeeded. It emerged over the weekend that there had been contact between one of the girls and Aqsa Mahmood, a Scottish woman who travelled to Syria herself. Initially communicating through Twitter, it appears Mahmood played a role in their journey to Turkey and now into the heart of the conflict in Syria. Criticism turned on the security services: according to Aamer Anwar, the lawyer for the family of Aqsa Mahmood, they are not even doing the ‘basics’ to prevent this kind of migration. The ‘basics’ seem to include social media monitoring. In an interview with the BBC, Anwar described his ‘incredulity’ that messages seemingly forewarning the girls’ actions weren’t acted upon. This mirrors the report produced by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament following the inquest into the murder of Lee Rigby. Writing in the Telegraph, Sir Malcolm Rifkind slams Facebook for failing ‘to notify the authorities when their systems appear to be used by terrorists’. There existed a private Facebook message sent by one of the killers around six months before the murder in which Adebowale ‘expressed his intent to murder a soldier in the most graphic and emotive manner’. The notion is that the security services, or even the social media companies themselves, ought to be catching these messages and acting on them. The problem is these ‘basics’ aren’t that simple. One of the key problems is the sheer volume of data. Conservative estimates place the total messages sent per day across Facebook’s systems (‘Messenger’ and Whatsapp) at a staggering fifty billion, or just over half a million messages a second. On Facebook alone. Moderating this manually is, of course, laughable.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in