Facebook, under pressure to crack down on Islamic State militants using its network, has quietly ramped up its efforts to block terrorist messages and videos in what some experts say is a potentially significant move by the Silicon Valley giant in the U.S. government’s battle against the terror group’s propaganda and recruitment efforts.

In an rare interview with Yahoo News, Monica Bickert, a former federal prosecutor who serves as Facebook’s top content cop, provided the company’s most detailed accounting yet of its efforts to identify and remove terrorist material from its site.

As described by Bickert, Facebook has set up what amounts to its own counterterrorism squad, with at least five offices around the world and scores of specialists fluent in several dozen languages. The group, part of Facebook’s Community Operations team, responds around the clock to reports by Facebook users and others of terrorists using the social media network, taking terror-related material down — and then looking for related accounts that the same actors might be using.

“If we become aware of an account that is supporting terrorism, we’ll remove that account,” said Bickert, chief of global policy management, in an interview at Facebook’s sprawling campus in Menlo Park, Calif. “But we want to make sure that we get it all. So we will look at associated accounts — pages this person liked or groups that he may have belonged to — and make sure that we are moving all associated violating content.”

Facebook — which now has 1.5 billion users, 70 percent of them outside the United States and Canada — is not only looking for messages or posts from avowed members of the Islamic State or other terror groups, Bickert says. It has instituted community standards policies — controversial in some circles — that go beyond those of other social media firms, banning expressions of “support” for terrorist groups and expressions “praising” their leaders or “condoning” violent terrorist acts.

“If there is a terror attack that happens in the world, and somebody shares even a news report of that and says, ‘I think this is wonderful,’ or they’re mocking the victims or celebrating what has happened, that violates our policies and we’ll remove it,” said Bickert.

Her comments come at a time when Facebook and other social media firms have been feeling increasing heat from U.S. and other Western counterterrorism officials, members of Congress and even presidential candidates like Hillary Clinton, who have called on the companies to be more aggressive in shutting down ISIS propaganda and reporting it to the government.

The companies, wary about being perceived as too cozy with the U.S. intelligence community and of compromising the privacy of their users, have resisted some of these proposals, arguing that they could require them to engage in censorship. One provision, sponsored by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would require social media firms to report to U.S. law enforcement “all terrorist activity” on their networks.

The provision was inserted into a Senate intelligence bill last summer — and then removed after intense lobbying by a host of trade associations representing Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media and tech companies, including Yahoo, congressional staff members told Yahoo News.

The provision “would impose a new government mandate requiring a broad spectrum of companies to report users’ activities and communications to the U.S. Government … and risks chilling free speech,” the trade groups, including Reform Government Surveillance, a coalition of social media firms that includes Facebook, wrote in a Dec. 11 letter obtained by Yahoo News.

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