As radicalization grows online, so do the efforts to combat it
Anti-extremists step up campaign to subvert jihadist message
Five months after a group of seven youths left Quebec, allegedly to join the jihad in the Middle East, with another 10 attempting to follow in their footsteps in May, it’s still not clear whether they were radicalized by someone in their entourage, by individuals online, and/ or whether they radicalized each other.
But once on the path to violent extremism, there was no end to what they could find online to solidify their beliefs, just a few clicks away.
It takes about 30 seconds to create a Twitter account and connect to someone in Syria. And as one journalist in France found out, if you’re looking for it, it takes just two days to be drowning in ISIL propaganda on your Facebook page, as Facebook’s algorithm suggests similar sites and friends with the same interests. A constant stream of beheadings and images of children with guns soon start to seem normal.
ISIL has put out a guide to travelling to the territory they control, as well as a guide on how to be a jihadi in the West, complete with training on toy Nerf guns, making pressure-cooker bombs and stealing money from infidels.
Both ISIL and al-Qaida produce English-language magazines. There is also a daily radio news program — Al Bayan radio, shared through so many social media links — that some have characterized as NPR-style, while reporting exclusively on what is good news for ISIL.
There are Ask Fm member pages dedicated to guiding girls to ISIL, maintained by jihadi brides on site.
And ISIL produces an abundance of slick videos — about half a dozen a week, each customized for its audience — using slow motion, a soundtrack of Islamic chants, heroic-looking, buff young soldiers, and prisoners in orange jumpsuits, uncoincidentally reminiscent of prisoners at Guantanamo.
Then there is Facebook, Snapchat, Surespot, Pasteit, Tumblr and of course Twitter, which Amarnath Amarasingam, a postdoctoral researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax, calls the “epicentre” of ISIL online.
In March, a Brookings Institute study found that over a period of two months there were 46,000 Twitter accounts supporting ISIL.
“Twitter has become pretty ruthless at shutting down accounts but they pop back up,” with a number added on the end, or under a jihadi name, says Amarasingam, likening the effort to eradicate the accounts to the old arcade game, Whacka-Mole.
“And now the suspensions themselves give these users increased legitimacy. If western organizations are pissed off at you, you must be spreading the truth and you become important.”
But short of cutting each terrorist sympathizer off from society — clearly an impossible task — what can be done to counter ISIS’s endless, violent narrative that has drawn an estimated 4,000 youths from Europe and North America to the Middle East?
A U.S. State Department internal memo, leaked to the New York Times this week, suggested that western governments’ social media and counter-messaging campaign was being “trumped” by the ISIL narrative online.
The writer suggested the coalition had to take a more global perspective. The “big proposal,” said the author of the memo, reporting from a meeting in Paris, was to create a coalition communications hub in the wartorn region, with 20 people from different countries sending out daily and weekly messages. In the short-term, they would ask the Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications to dedicate two full-time people to coalition messaging.
Despite the frustration of playing endless Whack-a-Mole, Marc Hecker is convinced that efforts to censor extremist content on the Web must be intensified.
“After months of looking at jihadi propaganda, with my Twitter feed becoming an illustrated encyclopedia of war crimes, I believe we can’t let totally illegal content circulate without reacting,” said Hecker, a professor at Sciences Po in Paris who has just published a paper on jihadism and the Internet.
Though many experts have said youths rarely become radicalized strictly online, an anthropologist in France who spoke to 160 families of affected youths said 90 per cent of them were radicalized online.
In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack, and with France being the largest source of foreign fighters in the West, France enacted new laws with increased prison time for supporting jihad (seven years, and up to 100,000 euros in fines), and allowed for the government to block certain websites.
Canada and Quebec are both passing similar legislation. Bill C-51, which just passed the Senate and is now law, gives Canadian courts the authority to order the removal of terrorist propaganda online, and new legislation would also criminalize the promotion of terrorism in general. A bill tabled in Quebec last week meanwhile, would amend the Quebec Charter of Rights and Freedoms to prohibit “engaging or disseminating” in speech that disseminates hate or incites violence.
One motivated victim, Calgary mother Christianne Boudreau, spent months scanning ISIL videos, searching for a glimpse of her son Damien before he was killed in Syria in 2013. Since then, she has led Canada’s counter-offensive. She is working with Extreme Dialogue, an organization started by the British Institute of Strategic Dialogue, a self-described “think and do tank,” to train people across the country to prevent radicalization of teenagers in school.
The Extreme Dialogue website, funded in part by Public Safety Canada, acts as a counter-messaging tool of its own and so far features video interviews with Boudreau and a former white supremacist, Daniel Gallant.
“The way I look at it, it’s one piece in trying to level the playing field. ISIL thinks they will take over and manipulate youths — we want to meet them on their same platform. If we can infiltrate any of it and slow the process on their propaganda.”
But now the funding has run out, Boudreau said.
“We’ve had huge positive feedback and people saying they want to help. But the government in Canada has focused on reactive measures — repressive laws like Bill C-51.”
Asked what Canada was doing to counter extremism online, a spokesperson for Public Safety Canada said the government was working “to identify opportunities for intervention before an individual crosses the threshold to violent extremism, whether at home or abroad, and to identify community resources to help prevent violent extremism. Effective counter-narratives to extremist ideological messaging emerge from within affected communities. They cannot be imposed by outsiders, even the most well-meaning.”
This week Boudreau started a new group, Mothers for Life, with other parents around the world who have lost children to ISIL or other extremist groups.
She plans to work with Google and Twitter, for instance, on boosting their own content and diverting hashtags — so when someone searches for “Isil (Isis)” or “Jihad” they will fall on Extreme Dialogue, perhaps, instead of ISIL — and using Thunderclap, software that exponentially amplifies their own tweets and videos as widely as those of extremist groups. Facebook also appears more amenable of late to boosting some content rather than blocking more pages.
“The way I look at it ,it’s one piece in trying to level the playing field. ISIL thinks they will take over and manipulate youths—we want to meet the mon their same platform.
CHRISTIANNE BOUDREAU CALGARY MOTHER WORKING TO PREVENT ONLINE RADICALIZATION OF YOUTH