The U.S. has been aggressively pushing for the involvement of tech companies in the war against the Islamic State. President Barack Obama, for instance, personally met with industry leaders to solicit their cooperation amid the use of the Internet as a propaganda and recruitment platform by terrorists, according to Digital Trends. While Google has not announced that it will allow government access to private data or let it enforce some form of control, it has revealed that it will now be pushing anti-ISIS ads in search results.
Google explained that when a user searches certain keywords and phrases related to Islamic extremism, the result will be directed to an anti-ISIS advertisement that exhorts the search user to pursue a different path, Engadget reported. The program was disclosed in a home affairs committee hearing at the British Parliament.
This new initiative will mainly be working with non-governmental organizations, which would create and place counter-radicalization advertisements. Google wants to make sure that when people put potentially damaging search terms into the search engine, "they will also find this counter narrative," Anthony House, senior manager for public policy at Google, told The Guardian. "We should get the bad stuff down, but it's also extremely important that people are able to find good information, that when people are feeling isolated, that when they go online, they find a community of hope, not a community of harm."
The program, which is identified as part of the Google AdWords Grant program, is just one of the two pilot anti-radicalization schemes. The other involves the YouTube platform, which follows the same framework at Google's search engine. Anti-ISIS content will be pushed forward for queries about Islamic extremism or terrorism.
