Andy Greenberg, writing for Wired, on Google’s Clever Plan to Stop Aspiring ISIS Recruits:
Google has built a half-trillion-dollar business out of divining what people want based on a few words they type into a search field. In the process, it’s stumbled on a powerful tool for getting inside the minds of some of the least understood and most dangerous people on the Internet: potential ISIS recruits. Now one subsidiary of Google is trying not just to understand those would-be jihadis’ intentions, but to change them.
Jigsaw, the Google-owned tech incubator and think tank—until recently known as Google Ideas—has been working over the past year to develop a new program it hopes can use a combination of Google’s search advertising algorithms and YouTube’s video platform to target aspiring ISIS recruits and ultimately dissuade them from joining the group’s cult of apocalyptic violence. The program, which Jigsaw calls the Redirect Method and plans to launch in a new phase this month, places advertising alongside results for any keywords and phrases that Jigsaw has determined people attracted to ISIS commonly search for.
On the one hand, interfering with the recruitment of Daesh—and we really ought to call them Daesh—is objectively A Good Thing. On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder what will happen when Google and I disagree. More specifically, I wonder whether I’ll notice Google trying to change my mind.