Fight ISIS with ‘likes’ suggests Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg observed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the only way to counter Isis and similarly dangerous groups was through positivity – a ''like attack'' as she called it, than destructive hate speech.

She cited the example of a neo-Nazi party's Facebook page and said people with good hearts went onto the page and offered positivity -- a "like-attack."

''The best antidote to bad speech is good speech. The best antidote to hate is tolerance,'' she said at Wednesday's event.

Facebook users in Germany launched a '' 'like attack' on the Facebook page of the NPD,'' a far-right group accused of using the platform to propagate hate, Sandberg said.

''Rather than scream and protest, they got 100,000 people to "like" the page, who did not "like" the page and put messages of tolerance on the page, so when you got to the page, it changed the content and what was a page filled with hatred and intolerance was then tolerance and messages of hope,'' Sandberg said.

"The best thing to speak against recruitment by Isis are the voices of people who were recruited by Isis, understand what the true experience is, have escaped and have come back to tell the truth," she said. "Counter-speech to the speech that is perpetuating hate we think by far is the best answer."

According to commentators, though Sandberg's intentions were good, even the idea that something as inconsequential as a "like-attack" could have a deep effect might not be agreeable to some.

Terrorist activity on social networks was a problem that was finally being officially recognised by tech companies, there seemed to little agreement between the tech world and the government about what was needed to be done.