Hillary Clinton on Sunday called for tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to “deny online space” to ISIS and other terrorist groups who use social media and the internet to recruit followers and communicate with sympathizers.
In an interview with ABC “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos, the Democratic presidential candidate said that big tech companies would “have to help us take down these announcements and these appeals.”
Terrorist groups have increasingly relied on social media to communicate with sympathizers. And Tashfeen Malik, one of the San Bernardino terrorists, reportedly posted her allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Facebook just before she and her husband, Syed Farook, killed 14 people at a holiday party on Wednesday.
“We’re going to need help from Facebook and from YouTube and from Twitter,” Clinton said Sunday. “They cannot permit the recruitment and the actual direction of attacks or the celebration of violence by the sophisticated internet user.”
Clinton expanded on those thoughts during an event at the Brookings Institution held later on Sunday when she said that tech companies and the federal government should work together to “deny online space” to terrorist recruiters.
“Just as we have to destroy their would-be caliphate — we have to deny them online space,” Clinton said at the Saban Forum, hosted by Haim Saban, a major donor to the Clinton campaign.
“If we truly are in a war against terrorism and we are truly looking for ways to shut off their funding, shut off the flow of foreign fighters, then we’ve got to shut off their means of communicating,” she added.
But she acknowledged that leaning on tech companies to monitor users’ activity will pose constitutional issues.
“This is complicated — you’re gonna hear all the usual complaints: freedom of speech, etc.,” she said.