Combatting Online Harms Through Innovation
exception is Amazon, which developed machine learning tools to detect the sale of banned or unsafe goods in its marketplace, though the Wall Street Journal reported those measures have been ineffective. 171 Some researchers have used AI to detect online sales of particular items, such as illegal wildlife products sold on social media. 172 Another study used AI to detect likely food recalls and predict potentially unsafe food products based on analyses of Amazon customer reviews. 173
E. Terrorist and violent extremists’ abuse of digital platforms, including the use of such platforms to promote themselves, share propaganda, and glorify real-world acts of violence DHS and others have recognized the importance of innovative technology in countering the online spread of terrorist and violent extremist content (TVEC). As early as 2017, a DHS advisory committee explained that AI systems “can be deployed in the counter-terror and countering violent extremism arenas to provide improvements to DHS capabilities.” 174 In 2021, a DHS official described the agency’s consideration of using companies — some of which employ AI tools — to find warning signs of extremist violence on social media. 175 As part of its CP3 initiative, DHS also announced the opening of the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology, and Education Center (NCITE), centered at the University of Nebraska. 176 Per a federal grant, NCITE researchers are attempting to create an intelligent chatbot that will improve
See Alexandra Berzon, et al., Amazon Has Ceded Control of Its Site. The Result: Thousands of Banned, Unsafe or Mislabeled Products, Wall St. J. (Aug. 23, 2019), https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-has-ceded-control-of-itssite-the-result-thousands-of-banned-unsafe-or-mislabeled-products-11566564990. See also Melissa Heikkilä, Online marketplaces rife with unsafe and illegal items, study shows, Politico EU (Feb. 24, 2020), https://www.politico.eu/article/online-marketplaces-rife-with-unsafe-and-illegal-items-study-shows/; https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/product-safety-and-compliance-in-our-store. 172 See Enrico Di Minin and Christoph Fink, How machine learning can help fight illegal wildlife trade on social media, The Conversation (Apr. 23, 2019), https://theconversation.com/how-machine-learning-can-help-fightillegal-wildlife-trade-on-social-media-115021. See also Julio Hernandez-Castro and David L. Roberts, Automatic detection of potentially illegal online sales of elephant ivory via data mining, PeerJ Comput. Sci. 1:e10 (Jul. 2015), https://peerj.com/articles/cs-10/. 173 Adyasha Maharana, et al., Detecting reports of unsafe foods in consumer product reviews, JAMIA Open 2(3), 330–338 (Oct. 2019), https://academic.oup.com/jamiaopen/article/2/3/330/5543660. 174 Homeland Security Sci. and Techn. Advis. Comm., Artificial Intelligence White Paper (Mar. 10, 2017), https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Artificial%20Intelligence%20Whitepaper%202017 508%20FI NAL 2.pdf. See also Jonathan Fischbach, A New AI Strategy to Combat Domestic Terrorism and Violent Extremism, Harv. Nat’l Sec. J. Online (May 6, 2020) (discussing need for national security community to reassess effective use of AI in this area), https://harvardnsj.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/2020/05/Fischbach A-New-AIStrategy.pdf. 175 See Rachael Levy, Homeland Security Considers Outside Firms to Analyze Social Media After Jan. 6 Failure, Wall St. J. (Aug. 15, 2021), https://www.wsj.com/articles/homeland-security-considers-outside-firms-to-analyzesocial-media-after-jan-6-failure-11629025200?mod=rss Technology. 176 See https://www.dhs.gov/CP3; https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/news/2020/02/24/news-release-dhsselects-university-nebraska-omaha-lead-terrorism-research; https://www.unomaha.edu/ncite/. Although it involved network analysis and not AI, prior DHS grants funded development of datasets of terrorist groups that can predict which organizations are likely to increase in lethality. See https://www.start.umd.edu/about-baad. 171
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