The Associate Press reported on an “update of a complaint to the Securities and Exchange Commission that the National Whistleblower Center plans to file this week.

The filing obtained by the AP identifies almost 200 auto-generated pages — some for businesses, others for schools or other categories — that directly reference the Islamic State group and dozens more representing al-Qaida and other known groups.

One page listed as a “political ideology” is titled “I love Islamic state.”

It features an IS logo inside the outlines of Facebook’s famous thumbs-up icon.”

AP wrote:

On Wednesday, U.S. senators on the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation will be questioning representatives from social media companies, including Monika Bickert, who heads Facebooks efforts to stem extremist messaging.

…

In response to a request for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told the AP:
“Our priority is detecting and removing content posted by people that violates our policy against dangerous individuals and organizations to stay ahead of bad actors.

Auto-generated pages are not like normal Facebook pages as people can’t comment or post on them and we remove any that violate our policies.

While we cannot catch every one, we remain vigilant in this effort.”

Facebook has a number of functions that auto-generate pages from content posted by users.

The updated complaint scrutinizes one function that is meant to help business networking.

It scrapes employment information from users’ pages to create pages for businesses.

In this case, it may be helping the extremist groups because it allows users to like the pages, potentially providing a list of sympathizers for recruiters.

But as the report shows, plenty of material gets through the cracks — and gets auto-generated.

The AP story in May highlighted the auto-generation problem, but the new content identified in the report suggests that Facebook has not solved it.

The report also says that researchers found that many of the pages referenced in the AP report were removed more than six weeks later on June 25, the day before Bickert was questioned for another congressional hearing.

The issue was flagged in the initial SEC complaint filed by the center’s executive director, John Kostyack, that alleges the social media company has exaggerated its success combatting extremist messaging.

“Facebook would like us to believe that its magical algorithms are somehow scrubbing its website of extremist content,
” Kostyack said.

“Yet those very same algorithms are auto-generating pages with titles like
‘I Love Islamic State,’ which are ideal for terrorists to use for networking and recruiting.”

So, the massive social media platform is working to crack down on so-called extremism, but that doesn’t include ISIS?

Come on.