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In recent years, extremists have increasingly turned to online spaces to distribute propaganda and as a recruitment tool. While there is a clear need for governments and social media companies to respond to these efforts, such responses also bring with them a set of ethical challenges. This paper provides an ethical analysis of key policy responses to online extremist propaganda. It identifies the ethical challenges faced by policy responses and details the ethical foundations on which such policies can potentially be justified in a modern liberal democracy. We also offer an ethical framework in which policy responses to online extremism in liberal democracies can be grounded, setting clear parameters upon which future policies can be built in a fast-changing online environment.

The basic issue that this chapter examines is how we set morally justifiable limits on what people say online, with a specific focus on speech acts related to terrorism. The chapter takes as one of its foundational assumptions that there are situations in which free speech, while an important and potentially fundamental right, can be justifiably limited: ‘If there is a Free Speech Principle, it means that free speech is a good card to hold. It does not mean that free speech is the ace of trumps’. This chapter draws from discussions of free speech to explain how and when particular sorts of constraints on public
communications are justified. It begins with a recognition that the norms of behaviour and free speech online are evolving, moves to an exploration of the key conceptual and ethical discussions around free speech, and closes with a set of framing questions to give some guidance as to how we can approach the question of whether online terrorist public communications should be restricted or not.

This 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 U.S. and partner governments and nongovernmental organizations can use our analysis to more effectively implement top-down messaging to directly counter ISIS support on Twitter. Our original study found that there are six times the number of ISIS opponents than there are supporters on Twitter. We argue that it is critical to empower these influencers by drawing on lessons from the commercial marketing industry. We consequently highlight approaches to identify influencers on social media and empower them with both training and influential content.

The number of programs dedicated to countering violent extremism (CVE) has grown in recent years, yet a fundamental gap remains in the understanding of the effectiveness of such programs. This is particularly the case for CVE campaigns, which are increasingly conducted in the online space. The goal of this report is to help CVE campaign planners better evaluate the impact of online efforts. It reviews prior assessments of online CVE campaigns, provides recommendations for future assessments, and provides a case study of one particular CVE campaign — the Redirect Method. A limited evaluation of the Redirect Method process variables suggests that the implementers are able to use advertisements linking to counterextremist videos to effectively expose individuals searching for violent jihadist or violent far-right content to content that offers alternative narratives. Users clicked on these ads at a rate on par with industry standards. However, as is the case with other CVE evaluations, this partial evaluation did not assess the impact of the video content on user attitudes or behavior. The potentially highly radical nature of the Redirect Method’s target audience makes evaluation of the campaign particularly complicated and therefore might necessitate the recruitment of former extremists to help gauge audience response. Alternatively, it might be advisable to analyze user comments to understand how a subsample of users respond to the content.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

The online presence of incels, or involuntary celibates, has been an increasing security concern for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers in recent years, given that self-identified incels – including Alek Minassian and Elliot Rodger – used the Internet to disseminate incel ideology and manifestos prior to committing acts of violence. However, little is empirically known about the incel movement in general or their online communities in particular. The present study draws from a set of comments from r/Incels, a now defunct but once popular subreddit dedicated to the incel community, and compares the most highly-upvoted comments (n = 500) to a random set of other comments (n = 500) in the subreddit. This qualitative analysis focuses on identifying subcultural discourse that is widely supported and engaged with by members of the online community and the extent to which incels utilize this online space to reaffirm deviant behavior. Our study underscores the importance, as well as the difficulties, of drawing from online sources like web-forums to generate new knowledge on deviant communities and behaviors. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this analysis, its limitations, and avenues for future research.