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In this article, Charlie Winter challenges the way in which the word ‘propaganda’ is used in contemporary discourse around war and terrorism. He considers the case of the Islamic State, using it to demonstrate that the term – as it is conventionally understood – is an inadequate tool when it comes to describing the full range of tactical and strategic approaches to communication that are employed by insurgents today. If anything, he contends, ‘propaganda’ refers to an entire information ecosystem in which different media are geared towards different tasks.

In February 2019, Moonshot launched The Redirect Method with funding from the Community Resilience Fund and in collaboration with the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and
Violence Prevention at Public Safety Canada. Canada Redirect was first deployed across all 13 Canadian provinces and territories, and in June 2019 our campaigns were subdivided to incorporate 353 postcodes in Canada’s six largest cities. These localized campaigns enabled Moonshot to collect granular data on extremist search appetite, test experimental messaging, and
explore the viability of providing at-risk users with content and services in their community.

Using the updated Redirect Method, Canada Redirect aimed to reach at-risk users with content that aligned as closely as possible with what they were searching for. Moonshot used subject-matter expertise and in-house knowledge to match relevant counter-narratives to their respective target audiences. This approach taps into a range of content ecosystems, such as music, gaming, and literature, to deliver alternative messaging that contrasts with the extremist content a user may be searching for, such as neo-Nazi manifestos or an ISIS nasheed. Moonshot adapted the Redirect Method to include content specific to the Canadian context in order to increase the relevance and impact of counter-narratives to the Canadian at-risk audience.

This report details Canada Redirect’s project phases, achievements, and findings from our digital campaigns, which were deployed across Canada for over a year, from 21 February 2019 to 23 March 2020.

Each day approximately 6,800 members of the private security workforce are deployed across Kansas City to provide protection services at venues, many of which have been identified as being critical infrastructure and/or key resources. While these guards are tasked with providing the first line of defense at these locations, there is currently no mechanism or protocol in place to facilitate the timely exchange of threat information between private security and the KCPD. To empower this resource as a terrorism prevention force multiplier the development of a web-based virtual knowledge-sharing initiative was explored in this study as a solution to provide “one-stop shopping” for consumers of homeland security-related needs from the private security industry. The factors measured in this study indicate that private security leaders perceived significant value in the proposed initiative and that the current environment is one that would favor success. One factor that supports this finding was the strong positive bias displayed to the “trust” factor, which was identified in this research as the lubricant of exchange relationships. While leaders did not demonstrate a high level of concern regarding the threat of a local terrorist act occurring in the next five years, the sharing of threat information did indicate that complacency could be reduced and the level of interest/value of participating be increased through the sharing of threat knowledge. Industry leaders also clearly indicated a universal belief that private security should have a role in the mission of countering terrorism to include critical infrastructure.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.