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VOX-Pol Blog post.

The focus of this paper is on the extremist group Britain First. As such, it does not explore online terrorist activity but rather examines how a group regarded as extremist is subject to online sanctions. The removal of the extremist group Britain First from Facebook in March 2018 successfully disrupted the group’s online activity, leading them to have to start anew on Gab, a different and considerably smaller social media platform. The removal also resulted in the group having to seek new online followers from a much smaller, less diverse recruitment pool. This paper demonstrates the further impact of the group’s platform migration on their online strategy – particularly on their choice of images and the engagement levels generated through them. The paper puts forward a number of key recommendations, most importantly that social-media companies should continue to censor and remove hateful content.

The latest Digital Citizens Alliance investigation exposes the fallacy that
much, if anything, has changed. Partnering with the Global Intellectual Property
Enforcement Center (GIPEC), Digital Citizens has reviewed dozens of examples
of how terrorist organizations continue to rely on digital platforms such as
Google, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram to promote hate speech and recruit.
What it underscores is that the problem is not a surface issue that can be
solved simply through greater vigilance or the hiring of more content monitors.
The true cause of these troubling issues is the business model of these
platforms. When Cambridge Analytica inappropriately received the personal
information of at least 87 million Americans harvested by Facebook there was
no breach—Facebook turned that information over to the company because its
business model is to monetize users’ personal information with advertisers and
third parties.

This paper will examine how extremist organizations manage to present themselves as credible actors in the eyes of potential supporters on social media. This paper will address this question by exploring the role of authenticity in strategic narratives, which is believed to help these groups achieve this purpose. Apart from introducing this new theoretical concept, the paper will also apply it to a new case study of the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) – the first far-right organization to be designated as terrorist by the U.S. and Canada. By conducting discourse analysis of the group’s social media propaganda on the Russian network VKontakte, the paper will show how the RIM makes its strategic narratives authentic and, as a consequence, creates an image of a credible and trustworthy actor and thus manages to reach out to its target audience.

Mubin Shaikh, Police Project Consultant with the Romeo Dallaire Initiative, discusses the evolution of radical propaganda online, social media and foreign fighters and the need for a robust counter narrative. Mr. Shaikh brings his real world knowledge of these issues as a former CSIS and RCMP operative, discussing them from the perspective of a real world and online counter-terrorism practitioner.

This interview is part of The SecDev Foundation’s Prevent Violent Extremism: A Social Media Research Portal – https://preventviolentextremism.info/