Using Facebook to Fight Terror.
CURNOW: You're back at the INTERNATIONAL DESK. Thanks for joining us. Facebook has a novel idea to fight terror that you may or may not like. The company's chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, says the best way to fight hateful speech and propaganda on the social network is to flood it --</s>CURNOW: -- with messages of hope. Samuel Burke joins us now live from New York. Essentially she's saying love-bomb jihadi websites. Is there any reason to think that might work with a group as prolific and hateful as ISIS?</s>SAMUEL BURKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Counter speech: that is what Sheryl Sandberg is pushing here, Robyn, where you see hate speech, go and counteract it with positive messages. She gave the example of a German Facebook group, trying to fight the message of a right-wing political party in Germany and literally inundated their page with 100,000 what they viewed as positive messages to try and fight them and a success there. But she went a step further, saying that this could apply to ISIS. Just take a look at what she said during this forum in Davos, saying the following. "The best thing to speak against recruitment by ISIS are the voices of people who were recruited by ISIS, understand what the true experience is, have escaped and have come back to tell the truth." And so while this may sound wishy-washy on the surface, just inundate the Facebook pages with positive messages, actually this is what we hear time and again from counterterrorism experts, saying there needs to be a counter-narrative, especially for Muslims all around the world. So this is in no way a holistic approach to combating ISIS online. But, again, this is what experts say over and over again. It does exist out there. You and I have talked on your show, Robyn, about #NotInMyName from a group of British Muslims. But what we hear over and over again is we need more and more of exactly what Sheryl Sandberg is talking about.</s>CURNOW: And the critical mass of everybody getting together, I think that's what's key here. So with that in mind, what are the social networks doing to combat extremism on their platforms? I mean, the White House is very involved in this.</s>BURKE: Very involved and this is actually good because we're starting to hear more dialogue. From Sheryl Sandburg, much of what they've been doing has been behind closed doors. And it's been us journalists trying to fight to find out what's happening. In the past two weeks, we've seen top counterterrorism officials meeting with the executives of Facebook and Apple and Twitter in Silicon Valley. Now we're starting to hear some of what's happening with what many have called a very positive dialogue. For the most part, to answer you question, Robyn, self-policing. These social networks rely on users like you and like me to flag up the content. So a lot of people say that's what hinders them, though we're seeing them take a slightly more proactive involvement, let's say, as the fight against ISIS goes on. What I see, I cover the business of tech a lot. And what I see here is a real problem. On the one hand, you have the business community telling networks like Twitter, make it easier to sign up. But that makes it harder to fight ISIS because then when you take down their social media accounts, then they can just open up their Twitter accounts again. So what I see constantly in coverage both of these worlds is the business pressures really not being in line for what's good to fight terrorism online. I think Facebook is the real leader here and a lot of the other social networks have to catch up to Facebook.</s>CURNOW: Yes. Really does having some sort of online Kumbaya make a difference when it comes to ISIS. I mean, that's the question. At least that conversation, as you say, is taking place and taking place out in the open. As always, Samuel Burke, thanks a lot. Well, that does it for us here at the INTERNATIONAL DESK. I'm Robyn Curnow. Thanks a lot for joining me. I will be back, though, in just over an hour with more on those accusations against Vladimir Putin and the death of a former Russian spy. In the meantime, I'm going to hand you over to "WORLD SPORT." END