On 25 April 2019, Vice Motherboard journalists Joseph Cox and Jason Koebler reported that during a recent Twitter company meeting a comment was made that:
Twitter hasn’t taken the same aggressive approach to white supremacist content [as it has to ISIS] because the collateral accounts that are impacted can, in some instances, be Republican politicians. The employee argued that, on a technical level, content from Republican politicians could get swept up by algorithms aggressively removing white supremacist material.
Indeed, it is well-known that most machine-learning algorithms in use in content moderation lead to a significant number of false positives (i.e. extremist content which turns out not to be). Even those that are sophisticated enough to correctly identify a vast majority of material correctly are likely to have these ‘false flags’, which when scaled up to millions of posts, inevitably causes non-extremist material to be flagged. Indeed, many archivists of human rights abuses of the Syrian Civil War, as an issue that Dima Saber is currently researching, have had their content removed from YouTube for this reason: their content was flagged incorrectly as extremist.
