Google Plus is nowhere near the largest social media platform but is reportedly growing thanks to crackdowns on extremism by Facebook and Twitter. The company has also acknowledged that it’s becoming a problem, according to the source, pointing to its policies as outlined in its terms of use. Moreover, the company says, it has a dedicated team for handling hate speech and violence as it appears on all of its platforms. However, it’s not immediately clear exactly how that’s being handled on the company’s social media platform. The search giant has addressed search using targeted advertising and has taken to outright blocking and banning some YouTube users. Google Plus, on the other hand, has recently seen an influx of groups associated with extremism associated with racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. What’s more, the number of members and groups linked to those behaviors and the sharing of both hateful and violent content seems to be growing.
Content shared ranges from images and memes to comments calling for violence against groups and individuals. That’s something that other social media giants have been enacting crackdowns against over the past several months, amidst other policy changes and bans. For example, bots are a major problem when it comes to the sharing of both malicious extremism and fake news. So Twitter began removing accounts with behavior patterns associated with bots and duplicate accounts earlier this year. On the other hand, near the end of 2017, Facebook hired a wave of new employees for content control. That’s on top of various other actions the company has taken and policy change implementations.
The problem, as noted by the source, is amplified by the fact that the groups and members on Google Plus are highly visible. Some accounts have thousands of followers and there appear to be quite a few that remain active even after being abandoned. Meanwhile, the problem of extremism is not at its zenith on the platform either. Instead, social media is reportedly used as a recruiting platform for groups associated with extremism. However there’s still a lot of content there and, as Google readily admits, quite a lot of work still to be done in taking it down.