Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
US looks to Facebook, private groups to battle online extremism
WASHINGTON: The US government, acknowledging its limited success in combating Islamic extremist messages, is recruiting tech companies, community organisations and educational groups to take the lead in disrupting online radicalisation.
The change in strategy, which took a step forward on Wednesday when the Justice Department convened a meeting with social media firms including Facebook, Twitter and Google, comes despite what critics say is scant evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts.
The meeting was “a recognition that the government is ill-positioned and illequipped to counter Islamic State online”, Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, said after attending the event.
The federal government is not best placed to counter extremist online recruitment efforts with messaging of its own, said George Selim, director of the Department of Homeland Security office that co-ordinates the government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) activities.
The goal now, he said, is to help “communities and young people to amplify their own messages”.
Those messages stem from so-called “counter-narrative” programmes under way at schools and community groups that have varying degrees of government support, according to government officials and private sector experts.
Past campaigns by the government of US president Barack Obama to thwart extremist propaganda globally were widely regarded as too reliant on fearbased rhetoric and graphic imagery to be effective. But whether the new joint effort with the private sector will fare better remains unclear, say experts in countering extremism.
The Obama government has had an uneasy relationship with Silicon Valley in recent years. Twitter and other tech firms have been reticent to appear too cozy with authorities on how they manage their content, though most have cautiously drifted toward being more compliant over the past year.
Facebook last year partnered with British research group Demos to examine the impact of “counter-messaging” against hate speech in four European countries.
The study, released in October, concluded it was “extremely difficult to calculate with any degree of precision” whether such efforts have a real impact on long-term attitudes or offline behaviour.
“You don’t necessarily know if something is going to change the way someone thinks offline, but we can measure whether somebody shares that content or interacts with it,” Monica Bickert, Facebook’s head of global policy management, said.
One of the new programmes, funded partly by Facebook and government agencies, underwrites “peer-to-peer” college courses that teach students to create their own anti-militant messaging.
Facebook declined to say how much it was investing in the programme, though Selim described Facebook’s overall investment in CVE initiatives as “very significant.”
Fatemah Yousef, a student at Kuwait Gulf University for Science and Technology student, flew to Washington this month to join a Facebook event showcasing counter-messaging projects created by students.
Yousef, 23, exhibited a blog that encourages Kuwaiti students to denounce violent extremism on social media.
A group from the University of Arkansas, produced a video showing graphic IS executions set to Black Sabbath’s War Pigs. Halfway through, the video switched to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin as captions urged viewers to “raise a flag” against extremism.
After viewing the video, a judge in the contest told the students that “probably about 90 to 95 percent” of the images in the video had been used in violent extremist recruitment videos.
“We’ve had this problem in other places where people try to instill fear in target audiences by showing all this mayhem, but it actually does the reverse with some,” said the judge, Quintan Wiktorowicz, a former White House director for community partnerships.
Another effort is under way at Worde, a Muslim educational organisation in Maryland, which last week launched a campaign that aims to refute IS messages through catchy videos and live broadcasts of discussions about mainstream Islam.
Worde plans to use software or survey questions to gauge the impact of its new counter-messaging campaign, said Hedieh Mirahmadi, the group’s president. “Everybody creates stuff but doesn’t really care about whether it’s connected to the science of evaluations.”
The peer-to-peer programme is the only private-sector counter-messaging initiative that acknowledges receiving training from the FBI, but a senior FBI official said the agency provides information to other non-governmental groups whose CVE-related work may include counter-messaging.
Some efforts avoid federal funding altogether. Mohamed Magid, a Virginia imam who has counselled several youth targeted by IS recruiters, leads an Islamic foundation soliciting donations to create a 24/7 online operation that would answer each IS video with peaceful messages. “We’re challenging the Muslim community to say, on this, yourself, respond to the challenge.” – Reuters