Counternarratives
Countering Far-Right Recruitment Online: CAPE’s Practitioner Experience
September 18, 2023Community Action for Preventing Extremism (CAPE) is Australia’s only not-for-profit counter-extremism project focused specifically on preventing a growth in right-wing extremism. By disseminating counter-narratives to extremism through the exitwhitepower.com website and directly engaging with individuals at-risk via social media, CAPE seeks to sow a seed of doubt that will reduce individual’s vulnerability to involvement in ...
Empowering ISIS Opponents on Twitter
September 18, 2023This Perspective presents options for operationalizing recent RAND Corporation findings about ISIS opponents and supporters on Twitter. This paper formulates a countermessaging approach for two main communication pathways. First, we articulate an approach for working with influential Twitter users in the Arab world to promote bottom-up and authentic counter-ISIS messaging. Second, we highlight ways that ...
Research Perspectives on Online Radicalisation: A Literature Review 2006–2016
September 18, 2023This literature review seeks to recalibrate our understanding of online radicalisation, how it is conceptualised within the literature and the extent to which the policy debate has advanced in response to technological and legal developments. Among the findings are the following: • In recent years, the overwhelming focus of this avenue of research has been on the global ...
Beating ISIS in the Digitial Space: Focus Testing ISIS Defector Counter-Narrative Videos with American College Students
September 18, 2023ISIS recruits on a 24/7 basis in over 21 languages over the Internet using videos, memes, tweets and other social media postings and swarming in on anyone that retweets, likes or endorses their materials to try to seduce them into the group. Their unprecedented social media drive has resulted in over 30,000 foreign fighters from ...
Starting Points For Combating Hate Speech Online
September 18, 2023Young People Combating Hate Speech Online is a project of the Council of Europe’s youth sector running between 2012 and 2015. The project aims to combat racism and discrimination in their online expression of hate speech by equipping young people and youth organisations with the competences necessary to recognize and act against such human rights ...
Countering Violent Extremism Online and Offline
September 18, 2023In the wake of devastating attacks by violent extremists around the world, policy makers have invested considerable effort into understanding terrorists’ use of the Internet as they radicalize and mobilize to violence. To that end, the article “Terrorist Use of the Internet by the Numbers: Quantifying Behaviors, Patterns, and Processes” by Paul Gill, Emily Corner, ...
Differentiating Act from Ideology: Evidence from Messages For and Against Violent Extremism
September 18, 2023Although researchers know a great deal about persuasive messages that encourage terrorism, they know far less about persuasive messages that denounce terrorism and little about how these two sides come together. We propose a conceptualization that distinguishes a message’s support for an act from its support for the ideology underlying an act. Our prediction is ...
Avoid the Pitfalls of Counter-Narratives
September 18, 2023Counter-narratives and campaigns promoting normality, are often highlighted as universal means against online propaganda from militant movements. However, such campaigns are driven by a number of unfortunate assumptions and are difficult to apply in practice. ...
Extremism on the Internet; The Fight Against Online Radicalisation Starts Offline
September 18, 2023Counter-narratives are often claimed to be the ingenuous solution for the prevention of extremism and radicalisation. They are intended to dismantle extremism’s propaganda or create positive alternatives to its communities. But the effect is dubious and may, at worst, lead to the opposite result. Therefore, education and critical thinking are the best form of prevention. ...
The Virtual Caliphate: ISIS’s Information Warfare
September 18, 2023ISIS will likely maintain the capacity to align its military and information operations (IO) in the coming years. Continuing conflicts and the plodding effort to address the underlying conditions where it has taken root will likely help ISIS retain physical sanctuary and command and control capability in Iraq, Syria, and North Africa, even if it ...