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This RAND working paper documents the proceedings of a daylong workshop, “Ethical Principles in Social-Behavioral Research on Terrorism: Probing the Parameters.” The workshop was convened to initiate a public discussion of the parameters that should guide the ethical conduct of social and behavioral research on terrorism that is frequently carried out in countries or among groups hostile to the United States. The workshop was organised into three sessions on the topics of “Deception and Concealment vs. Autonomy,” “Maximizing Beneficence and Maintaining Justice,” and “Ensuring Confidentiality.” Each session included a main speaker followed by short presentations from an expert panel, a plenary discussion, and a wrap-up by the session chair. All proceedings were taped and transcribed. The transcriptions of the presentations by the speakers and panelists have been lightly edited to improve readability, as have the introductory and wrap-up comments by the workshop organisers. The transcriptions of the plenary discussions have been summarized to highlight the main points.

This paper discusses how cyberspace has become a venue for terrorists groups for recruiting and proliferating propaganda and terrorism. Moreover, this study explores how the low cost Internet infrastructure and social media sites (such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube) have contributed to their networking and operations due to the convenience, in terms of availability, accessibility, message redundancy, ease of use, and the inability to censor content. Concepts such as cyber-weapons, cyber-attacks, cyber-war, and cyber-terrorism are presented and explored to assess how terrorist groups are exploiting cyberspace.

At a time when ISIS exploits social media to spread its ideology and gain new recruits, Monika Bickert, the head of global policy management at Facebook, explains how her team removes content that promotes violence and terrorism. Bickert, a former federal prosecutor, describes Facebook’s efforts to use “counter-speech” to fight hateful and extremist ideologies.

The Alt-Right is a neo-fascist white supremacist movement that is involved in violent extremism and shows signs of engagement in extensive disinformation campaigns. Using social media data mining, this study develops a deeper understanding of such targeted disinformation campaigns and the ways they spread. It also adds to the available literature on the endogenous and exogenous influences within the US far right, as well as motivating factors that drive disinformation campaigns, such as geopolitical strategy. This study is to be taken as a preliminary analysis to indicate future methods and follow-on research that will help develop an integrated approach to understanding the strategies and associations of the modern fascist movement.

Some moderation strategies of online content have targeted the individuals believed to be the most influential in the diffusion of such material, while others have focused on censorship of the content itself. Few approaches consider these two aspects simultaneously. The present study addresses this gap by showing how a socio-semantic network analysis can help identify individuals and subgroups who are strategically positioned in radical networks and whose comments encourage the use of violence. It also made it possible to identify the individuals and subgroups who act as intermediaries and whose statements are often the most violent.

Drawing on Tilly’s notion of “repertoire of action,” this article shows how the evolution of the global jihadist movement’s communicative action repertoire has increased the potential resonance of its discourse. It foresees the construction of the global jihadist movement’s discourse of mobilization as the result of the evolution of its network of actors, the context in which its communications are undertaken, and its adaptation to new communication technologies. Accordingly, it argues that the decentralization of the global jihadist movement has led to a widening of its communicative action repertoire and a diversification of its discourse offering.