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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 current National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin released by the Department of Homeland Security places the United States in a heightened threat environment due to “threat actors” becoming mobilized by “personal grievances, reactions to current events, and adherence to violent extremist ideologies…” (Summary of the Terrorism Threat to the United States, 2022). Online threats, extremism, and radicalization – particularly through video game platforms and applications – are an increasing threat. There is growing concern that connectivity provided by gaming can provide fertile ground for a range of potentially criminal activity and radicalization. Extremist organizations are leveraging the “gamification” of extremism to both radicalize new individuals and virtually bringing already radicalized individuals together, leading to an increased spread of extremist ideology worldwide. The gamification of extremism poses clear national security threats for both the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Intelligence Community (IC), particularly in terms of its counterintelligence implications. In order to address this concern, the DoD and IC can develop policies for moderating gaming and gaming app platforms for federal employees and service members, optimize the security clearance process to account for online gaming relationships, and modify current counterintelligence and cybersecurity training for federal employees and service members, and developing psychological interventions for individuals become radicalized.

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.

This paper explores the relationship of transphobia and other forms of harassment found across the events of the Gamergate hate movement through the development of an interactive social network analysis. With the social network being derived from hundreds of events tagged by hand, special consideration is given to the positionality and biases of its authors and how they affected this specific interpretation of Gamergate events. Informed largely by the transgender perspective of its first author, this paper draws particular conclusions around the propagation of transphobia in online hate movements, such as its intersectionality with other ideological cornerstones of Gamergate.

Cet article explore la relation entre la transphobie et d’autres formes de harcèlement observées lors des événements du mouvement de haine Gamergate à travers le développement d’une analyse de réseau social interactive. Avec le réseau social dérivé de centaines d’événements étiquetés à la main, une attention particulière est accordée à la position et aux biais de ses auteurs et à la manière dont ils ont influencé cette interprétation spécifique des événements de Gamergate. Principalement informé par la perspective transgenre de son premier auteur, cet article tire des conclusions particulières sur la propagation de la transphobie dans les mouvements de haine en ligne, comme son intersectionnalité avec d’autres piliers idéologiques de Gamergate.