The US government, acknowledging its limited success in combating Muslim extremist messaging, is recruiting tech companies, community organizations and educational groups to take the lead in disrupting online radicalization.
The change in strategy, which took a step forward on Wednesday when the US Department of Justice convened a meeting with social media firms including Facebook Inc, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s 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 ill-equipped to counter ISIS online,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, said after attending the event, using an acronym for the Islamic State (IS) group.
The federal government is not best placed to counter extremists’ online recruitment efforts with messaging of its own, said George Selim, director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that coordinates 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” programs underway at schools and community groups that have varying degrees of government support, according to government officials and private sector experts.
Past campaigns by the administration of US President Barack Obama to thwart extremist propaganda globally were widely regarded as too reliant on fear-based rhetoric and graphic imagery to be effective.
The Obama administration 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 last year, 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 behavior.
“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 programs, funded partly by Facebook and multiple government agencies, underwrites “peer-to-peer” (P2P) college courses that teach students to create their own anti-militant messaging.
Fatemah Yousef, a student at Kuwait Gulf University for Science and Technology, 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.
Another P2P finalist, a group from the University of Arkansas, produced a video showing graphic IS executions set to heavy metal band Black Sabbath’s War Pigs.
Half way through, the video switched to Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ as captions urged viewers to “raise a flag” against extremism.
Another effort is under way at WORDE, a Muslim educational organization 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.
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