Social media giant Facebook, Inc.’s commitment to being against terrorism after the horrific attacks that occurred in Paris Friday has been called into doubt, with the company apparently taking sides with ISIS instead of the voice of those opposed to the group.

Facebook stands accused of banning a Facebook group called “Report ISIS accounts” which, as the name may suggest, existed to identify Islamic State terrorists using the social networking site and report them to Facebook for illegal activity.

The Facebook group is said to have been started by an Anonymous offshoot called “Red Cult” and was established as part of the overall Anonymous operation which is going on under the #OpISIS hashtag, and had as its primary aim as doing the job that American and European law enforcement was either unable or unwilling to do in exposing accounts used by ISIS to operate and recruit on social media.

Facebook for its part has so far refused to explain why the group was taken down and has not replied to requests for information from a number of alternative news outlets, including the site Counter Current News and others.

Help not wanted

Islamic state and other similar terrorist groups use multiple means to recruit would-be jihadists online, but it has long been known that the most popular site they use has been a certain social network by the name of Facebook.

You’d think that with Facebook in 2015 being nearly ground zero for global terrorist recruiting that the site could use all the friends it could get, but apparently the house that Mark Zuckerberg built has put up the “help not wanted” sign and would rather continue to fail miserably at its current attempts to stop terrorist recruiting among its 1 billion plus users.

Perhaps what makes the decision more confounding is that reporting violations has always been encouraged by Facebook itself, and this is all this group had as its aim: the discovery, then subsequent reporting of accounts run by terrorists which by no means is a breach of Facebook’s guidelines.

The counter argument is that with so many users it’s hard for Facebook to police itself and perhaps someone made a mistake, but when a group is reported by residents of Raqa, Syria (the defacto capital of the Islamic State) you’d think that would raise a few red flags somewhere in Facebook.

SiliconANGLE has sent a message to Facebook’s public relations department for comment on the story and if we get a response eventually we’ll update the post.

Image credit: Wikimedia commons/ ISIS