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The 2023 Supreme Court case Twitter v. Taamneh found that defendant social media companies were not liable for aiding and abetting a terrorist attack overseas. The Court alluded to the existence of an alternative set of facts that might alter their analysis or produce a different outcome. This Comment explores those “other contexts” and seeks to identify what factors could produce a successful Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA) aiding and abetting claim against a social media company for an act of terrorism overseas. This is difficult, in part, because the framework for aiding and abetting liability provided in JASTA is seemingly incompatible with the operations of social media companies. To better evaluate how JASTA’s framework should apply to social media companies, both JASTA cases that do not involve social media companies and aiding and abetting cases derived from other sources are analyzed for their relevance to the social media context.

Ultimately, this Comment concludes that it would take an extraordinary set of facts to find social media companies secondarily liable for an act of terrorism. This is, in part, due to the nature of how social media operates and continues to progress at a rapid pace. The increasing role that social media plays in society highlights why deterring further Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) use of social media is critical; as avenues to recruitment and international planning increase, the risk to the United States’ national security also increases. Given that JASTA is not a solution, this Comment suggests other avenues to encourage social media companies to heighten their detection of FTO activity and prevent future attacks.

Despite the visible presence of violent extremist groups, and evidence of their connection with transnational groups such as Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, the number of empirical studies on this topic is limited in Bangladesh. There have been over 50 violent extremist attacks in Bangladesh in recent years (2013-2017) and digital media was used in different ways in most of these attacks. There appear to be no scholarly articles addressing this phenomenon in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, this project sheds light on the subject by analyzing life stories of Bangladeshi violent extremists. The data for this project was collected from content analysis of newspaper reports, Jihadi online magazines, and videos. Besides presenting current trends on how extremists are using digital media, this paper identifies challenges for counter-terrorism efforts in Bangladesh and provides suggestions to mitigate these challenges.

VOX-Pol Guest Lecture Series, Autumn 2023

Name: Dr. Saimum Parvez

Title: Digital Media and Narrowcasting: How Bangladeshi Violent Extremists Target Women and Youth for Recruitment

Outline: This presentation discusses the role of digital media in recruitment and how it helps recruits and recruiters discover each other. In Bangladesh, digital media have provided opportunities for violent extremists to reach previously unreachable demographics, such as women and youths from ‘westernized’ and well-off backgrounds. Saimum Parvez, Ph.D., is a MSCA-IMPACT cofund post-doctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). This research project is co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 101034352.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

Notwithstanding the discernable participation of women in terrorist groups, empirical research on women in terrorism is very scant in Bangladesh. To fill this gap, our article examines women’s involvement in terrorism by analyzing the life stories of dozens of Bangladeshi women terrorists. We use a terrorist lifecycle approach to understand the role of digital media in female participation, particularly in terms of when in the lifecycle digital media becomes important, and in terms of how digital media interacts with other factors to shape women’s involvement in terrorist organizations. After analyzing female profiles and their socio-demographic traits, we provide an in-depth analysis of three female terrorist lifecycles. An analysis of the profiles of Bangladeshi terrorists who use digital media reveals that women were more likely to use digital media than men in the recruitment phase. The in-depth case studies of three female terrorist profiles find that multiple and different factors impact their terrorist life cycles. Social networks – families and friends – typically play a role in individuals’ decision to become involved and further engagement in terrorism. Specifically, digital media allows women to expand their social interactions beyond what is possible in person, thus allowing for virtual pathways into terrorism.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.