With Facebook being a social media platform where people can share their views, creating groups or pages specifically for people with those views, more often than not it tends to be abused, especially by hate groups and terrorists who might use the platform to spread their propaganda.
However according to a report from The Wall Street Journal, Facebook has been attempting to fight back against such activities with counter speech, which is basically countering all the hate with messages of positivity (to put it simply). The social network has recently employed various methods to facilitate these counter speeches.
For example last year, Facebook allowed former members of extremists groups create fake accounts so that they could send positive messages to members of extremist groups, which they found actually proved to be rather effective at generating longer-lasting conversations. They also encouraged college students to create messages to counter extremism and were given $2,000 budgets and $200 worth of ad credits.
Speaking of ad credits, they also gave $1,000 worth of ad credits to counter speakers, like German comedian Arbi el Ayachi. This seems to be a new strategy that is employed not just by Facebook, but Google as well who will display ads about anti-radicalisation when users try to search for extremist topics. Whether or not such techniques will work in the long run remains to be seen, but drowning out the negativity and hate with positive messages is an idea we can get on board with.
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