Tuesday mornings, Monika Bickert and her team of content cops meet to discuss ways to remove hate speech and violent posts from Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social network. Recently, the group added a new tool to the mix: “counter speech.”
Counter speakers seek to discredit extremist views with posts, images and videos of their own. There’s no precise definition, but some people point to a 2014 effort by a German group to organize 100,000 people to bombard neo-Nazi pages on Facebook with “likes” and nice comments.
Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg appeared to endorse the idea during a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, suggesting a similar “like” attack could hurt groups like Islamic State.
“Google and Facebook have latched onto this notion as a means of responding to objectionable or harmful content and now they are beginning to do things to try to encourage it,” said Susan Benesch, a faculty associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and director of the Dangerous Speech Project.
Counter speech was the main topic when Ms. Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, gathered her team in late December. Two Wall Street Journal reporters attended the meeting, where the group discussed plans to encourage counter speech with competitions.
Members also debated how to raise the visibility of counter speech on Facebook and Instagram. Once such content is created, “How do you get it to the right people?” Ms. Bickert asked.
In one test, a think tank last year helped former members of right-wing and Islamist extremist groups create fake accounts to send private messages to current members of those groups. The messages prompted more, and longer-lasting, conversations than researchers expected, according to Ross Frenett, who conducted the test as a fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think tank that studies violent extremism. Facebook was informed of the research but not the fake accounts.
Facebook also has provided ad credits of up to $1,000 to counter speakers, including German comedian Arbi el Ayachi. Last year, Mr. el Ayachi filmed a video to counter claims from a Greek right-wing group that eating halal meat is poisonous to Christians. The one-minute video “was our take on how humor can be used to diffuse a false claim,” Mr. el Ayachi said.
In another initiative, Facebook teamed with the State Department and Edventure Partners, a consulting firm, to encourage college students to create messages to counter extremism. Last fall, 45 college classes from around the world participated in two competitions, where they were given $2,000 budgets and $200 ad credits.
“We need narratives that promote tolerance, peace and understanding,” Ms. Bickert told the group assembled for judging. “Those narratives can’t come from us. Those voices are you.”
There’s not much evidence that counter speech works, experts say. “Right now it’s an assumption” based on the premise that “better ideas ultimately defeat worse ideas,” said William Braniff, executive director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
Still, Facebook is working to encourage more counter speech across the social network — and activists say they need the help.
Counter-speech proponents aren’t as active on social media as right-wing populist groups in Europe, according to Facebook-sponsored studies by U.K. think tank Demos.
In an October report, Demos said there were 25,522 posts on populist right-wing pages and just 2,364 on counter speech pages. Right-wing groups were also much better at reaching people who didn’t already “like” their pages on Facebook, Demos found.
The report was based on a study of 27,886 posts uploaded to 150 Facebook pages from the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Hungary. Researchers logged 8.4 million likes, shares and comments on the posts over a two-month period from October 2014 to December 2014.
“The violent extremists have put a lot of money behind their propaganda and their voices in different ways,” said Erin Saltman, a senior counter extremism researcher for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. The counter speech movement “really does need a little help at this point.”
Corrections & Amplifications: Facebook was aware of Mr. Frenett’s research, but did not know of the fake accounts. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said Facebook was aware that participants had created fake accounts.