Facebook Messenger used to deradicalise extremists in pilot project 

Facebook Messenger has been used to try to deradicalise extremists in a pilot project funded entirely by the company.

People posting extreme far-right and Islamist content in the UK were identified and contacted in an attempt to challenge their views.

Of the 569 people contacted, 76 had a conversation of five or more messages and eight showed signs it had a positive impact, researchers claim.

Privacy campaigners say it means Facebook is straying into surveillance.

Technology companies have been urged to do more to stop extremist material littering their sites following a series of cases involving people who were radicalised online.

This pilot was led by the counter-extremism organisation Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), which says it was trying to mimic extremists' own recruitment methods.

It told the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme and BBC World Service's World Hacks it used software to scan several far-right and Islamist pages on Facebook for targets.

It then manually looked at their profiles looking for instances of violent, dehumanising and hateful language.

SOURCE: BBC NEWS
---DECRYPTED---