Abdullah-X tasked to take on Daesh
SOCIAL MEDIA TOOL PART OF A PUSH TO CREATE COUNTER-EXTREMISM CONTENT
Abdullah-X is a British Muslim with a working class accent, dressed in a black and red T-shirt with a large chain around his neck. He appears in YouTube videos talking about Syria and aimed at a young, radicalising audience.
The cartoon character is the latest weapon in the war against Daesh on social media, part of a push to create more counter-extremism content that is being supported by technology companies such as Facebook and Google.
As social media companies come under pressure from lawmakers to do more to control the proliferation of militant content in the wake of the attacks in Paris and California, some are emphasising their efforts to use their platforms to spread more palatable messages.
Abdullah-X asks his audience to think about the needs of the women and children in Syria, consider their own responsibilities to their families at home and to question whether they really know the actual motivations of groups who claim to be fighting for Islam. “There is a call of duty for Syria, it is to be well informed and not misinformed,” he ends.
Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, do not create the content themselves but have helped non-profit organisations by giving them tools to target the right audience online — young western Muslims who either already show an interest in extremist content or fit the profile of those who do.
Training sessions
In an column in the New York Times last week Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman, called for tools to help de-escalate tensions on social media “sort of like spellcheckers, but for hate and harassment”. Facebook has participated in “counter speech” social media training sessions across the world, especially in the past few months. The US government has sponsored “technology camps” bringing together social media companies and civil society.
Earlier in the year, the US helped set up what the White House called a “digital communications hub” in the Gulf, which produces content in Arabic for the internet that challenges Daesh narratives and recruitment.
Sasha Havlicek, chief executive of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank said it was up to the technology companies to do more to help counter-extremists work on a large scale, including funding the work of NGOs.