Google to bring up anti-radicalisation links in effort to tackle terrorism

A senior Google executive has revealed that would-be militants searching for terrorism-related material online will be shown anti-radicalisation links in a bid to tackle growing extremism. Dr Anthony House said that under the new pilot scheme, the risk of people moving towards becoming a jihadi would be greatly minimised.

"We are working on counter-narratives around the world. This year one of the things we're looking at is we are running two pilot programmes," said House. "One is to make sure these types of views are more discoverable. The other is to make sure when people put potentially damaging search terms into our search engine they also find these counter narratives."

House revealed the pilot scheme was intended to convince MPs that internet giants are exerting their full efforts to combat terrorism. Under the scheme, it was initially believed that terrorism-related queries will reveal search results opposite to what is being searched for, but House clarified the counter terrorism messages will be shared via AdWords.

Google AdWords are the sponsored links seen next to the search results. "We offer Google AdWords Grants to NGOs so that meaningful counter-speech ads can be surfaced in response to search queries like 'join Isis'," said House, according to a report in The Telegraph.

According to House, the Internet giant has been working to tackle terrorism on some of its other channels as well, including YouTube. Nearly 14 million videos were reportedly taken down from YouTube in 2014 due to violation of the social media channel's policies.

Earlier in January, Silicon Valley leaders were set to meet with several senior White House and federal law enforcement officials on in California to discuss the use of social media by terrorists to incite violence. The move came as mounting pressure looms over social media companies to tackle the growing use of Internet to spread hate crime by terrorist organisations, like IS (Daesh).