Online extremism: UK government's Islamic State blocking tool is neat but incomplete

The UK government – with considerable pomp and ceremony – recently unveiled a new online tool for detection and removal of jihadi videos boasting a high success rate. It has been claimed by the Home Office that the machine learning tool, which the government developed with ASI Data Science, can identify 94% of Islamic State (IS) video uploads with a typical error rate of 0.005%. It means that 940 out of every 100,000 IS videos posted online can be correctly identified, but – of that same sample – five videos not serving up IS propaganda will have been falsely flagged by the tool.