Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook exec, touts taking down Islamic State with online ‘like attack’

As governments struggle to sack the Islamic State terror group from social media, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told attendees at the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday that netizens can assist with those efforts by acting overly nice.

Recalling a recent campaign launched by users in Germany against Neo-Nazis, Ms. Sandberg said social media users should turn the other cheek to counter posts penned by supporters of the Islamic State.

“The best antidote to bad speech is good speech. The best antidote to hate is tolerance,” she said at Wednesday’s event.

In Germany, Facebook users launched a ” ’like attack’ on the Facebook page of the NPD,” a far-right group accused of using the platform to propagate hate, Ms. Sandberg said.

“Rather than scream and protest, they got 100,000 people to like the page, who did not like the page and put messages of tolerance on the page, so when you got to the page, it changed the content and what was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then tolerance and messages of hope,” Ms. Sandberg said.

Acknowledging the success of the so-called “like attack,” the Facebook executive suggested that users can react similarly to counter the online efforts of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

“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. Amplifying those voices — counter-speech to the speech that is perpetuating hate — we think, by far, is the best answer,” Ms. Sandberg said.

Her suggestion comes as lawmakers in Washington wrestle with curbing the terror group’s use of social media to spread ideologies and identify new recruits, and both the House and the Senate are currently weighing proposals that could force Internet companies to police their platforms to a greater extent.

“Instead of having to go to Syria to train, all they have to do is log-on to get online training,” Rep. Ted Poe, Texas Republican, said during a congressional hearing last month in which he insisted that “nearly all” of the 71 individuals charged in the U.S. for ISIS-related crimes in recent months “spent hours online voicing their support for ISIS and later were arrested.”

“We are losing a popularity contest to people who behead women,” Rep. Brad Sherman, California Democrat, said at the same House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing last month.

A White House briefing document obtained by The Intercept and published this week demonstrates that the use of social media by terror suspects has sparked discussions not just on Capitol Hill, but within the executive branch as well.

“Should we explore ways to more quickly and comprehensively identify terrorist content online so that online service providers can remove it if it violates their terms of service?” the Obama administration pondered in the document, published Wednesday. “Are there technologies that could make it harder for terrorists to use the internet … or easier for us to find them when they do?”