After five months of research, a whistleblower says Facebook allows terrorist sympathizers to thrive not only by failing to remove their accounts, but also by auto-creating celebratory videos and pages for terrorist groups.

The National Whistleblower Center in Washington (NWC) has published a 48-page comprehensive study into how Facebook neglects to curb, and even boosts, Al-Qaeda affiliated militants' outreach, arguing that Facebook's lack of action facilitates the recruitment of terrorists.

The study, conducted by an unnamed whistleblower from August through December 2018, showed that out of 3,228 accounts belonging to 'friends' of self-identified terrorists, only 30 percent were removed by the platform.

These "friends" hail from around the world. Those who were singled out for the survey are based in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Among them, "many openly identified as terrorists themselves and shared extremist content," the executive summary of the report states.

The social media giant, which recently prided itself on taking down 99 percent of Al-Qaeda and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS) related content before it is reported by users, actually creates such content itself with its auto-generating tools, according to the report.

For example, it refers to an auto-generated page Facebook "set up" for Al-Shabaab militant group, complete with an ISIS logo. Somalia-based Al-Shabaab has long been associated with Al-Qaeda. In 2015, a splinter group of its fighters pledged allegiance to IS.

The page came about because some users listed their membership in the terrorist group as their job occupation, prompting Facebook's AI to create a "local business" page.

Another popular feature embedded in the Facebook algorithm allows for glorification of terrorism and extremism, the report says, referring to "celebration" and "memories" videos. It turns out that the seemingly innocuous feature makes no distinction between a user sharing a video with, say, birthday celebrations, and violence-filled extremist content. One such chilling "celebration" video featuring puddles of blood racked up over 2,000 likes, the report notes.

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https://www.rt.com/usa/458955-facebook-terrorism-support-research/

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A Chinese national and another man have been indicted on conspiracy charges to steal personal information and commit fraud by gaining access to the database of America's second-largest health insurer, affecting 80 million people.

According to the indictment unsealed by the US Department of Justice on Thursday, 32-year-old Chinese national Fujie Wang and another suspect identified as John Doe hacked into computers of Anthem Inc. and three other business that have not been named. The suspects are alleged to have duped the employees of Anthem into giving them unimpeded access to the data of 78.8 million customers and employees with "spearfishing" emails. When an employee clicked on a hyperlink in the email, a file was downloaded which infected their computer with malware. The malware included a back door that gave the hackers unauthorized remote access to the company's files.

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https://www.rt.com/usa/458949-anthem-hacking-chinese-indictment/