In Denmark, a man is accused of making a number of terrorist threats on Twitter, which again shows that the authorities take “only” threatening terrorism very seriously. But social media like Twitter and Facebook do not seem to take such threats as serious.

A 46-year-old man living in the Copenhagen area is accused of threatening and inciting terrorism. He must have done this in several posts on Twitter in October last year, reports the news agency Ritzau, after a press release from the prosecution.

He is also accused of having encouraged others to commit crimes and of having publicly expressed support for terrorist attacks in France by 2020. It must also have happened on Twitter.

The French witnessed three terrorist attacks last autumn. On September 25, people were attacked with a knife in front of a building in Paris, where Charlie Hebdo magazine previously had premises. Shortly afterwards, on October 17, teacher Samuel Paty (47) had his head cut off, this happened on the outskirts of Paris after Paty had used satires by Muhammad in teaching. On October 29, three people were killed when a man attacked with a knife in a church in Nice. The attack in Nice must have been the focus of several of the defendants’ Twitter posts.

The man was arrested on October 29 last year and has since been in custody.

“The indictment shows that the mere threat of committing terrorist acts is taken very seriously, and is something the authorities very quickly take action on,” says State Attorney in Copenhagen Lise-Lotte Nilas in the press release.

It does not appear in the press release why the accused must have threatened to commit terrorism, or whether the threats were directed at individual persons, places or institutions. Nor does it say anything about how he views the charges against him. But you can imagine when one of the Twitter messages reads: “If you make fun of the truth, we play football with their heads”. Another message read: «Decapitate France».

The case will be heard in Copenhagen City Court, from 28 February to 23 March 2022. It is scheduled as a trial, which means that the prosecution will file a stand for a sentence of up to four years in prison for men. Defendant has dual citizenship. The prosecuting authority wants him to be deprived of Danish citizenship and deported from Denmark with a permanent ban on entry. They also want a ban on contacting people convicted of terrorism-related crime.

Goes under the radar

With others, Twitter itself fails to weed out violent hate speech, something that Facebook also struggles with. Islamists, both IS and Taliban supporters, go under the radar. For Facebook controllers, I seem to be preoccupied with being political opinion policy and removing what they believe is for scantily clad ladies, including breastfeeding mothers, and they are of making algorithms that capture the extreme content.

Politics has revealed that images of beheadings, extremist propaganda and violent hatred linked to IS and the Taliban have been shared in several Facebook groups over the past year – despite the social networking giant insisting they have stepped up efforts to remove such content.

Posts – some even labeled as “insightful” and “engaging” via the new Facebook tool to promote “community interactions” – praised Islamist violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, including videos of suicide bombings and calls to attack rivals across the region and in the West, according to a review of FB activity between April and December. At least one of the group had more than 100,000 members.

In several Facebook groups, the “troll” competes with Sunni and Shia militias by posting pornographic images and other obscene images in rival groups in the hope that Facebook would eliminate the competitor.

Many countries across the Middle East and Central Asia are struggling with sectarian violence, with Islamists using Facebook as a weapon to advance a hateful agenda and rally supporters for their own cause. Hundreds of these groups have emerged on Facebook over the past 18 months – and they are in languages ​​such as Arabic, Pashto and Dari, Politico points out. Precisely language poses a challenge. Facebook struggles to detect extremist content because its automated content filters are not sophisticated enough to flaunt hate speech in Arabic, Pashto or Dari.

At the end of 2020, Facebook discovered e.g. just 6 percent of hate speech in Arabic was flagged on Instagram before it was released. That would be a 40 percent removal rate for similar material on Facebook, reports Politico.

In Afghanistan, where about five million people log on to the platform each month, the company has a lack of local languages, therefore less than 1 percent of hate speech has been removed.

That there are good systems for pornographic images and not for beheadings and incitement to terror, Facebook should take far more seriously than they seem to do – and it can not be the company’s finances it stands on.