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In this report, Tech Against Terrorism investigates the use of designation: a powerful tool available to governments to facilitate improved action against terrorist use of the internet in a way that upholds the rule of law.
We detail how terrorist designation differs from one jurisdiction to another. We argue that these counterterrorism measures, whether online or offline, must be grounded: judiciary systems must be brought into the 21st century when designating terrorism. In the context of terrorist use of the internet, governments and legislatures must take ownership of the problem, rather than leave the issue to tech companies who must second guess fragmented and incoherent designation processes.

This paper was presented at the 2nd European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) Advisory Group conference, 17-18 April 2018, at Europol Headquarters, The Hague. The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of Europol.
In a speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May called on social media companies to do more to remove and block terrorist content from their platforms [1]. In the speech she stated that the average lifespan of online propaganda from the so-called Islamic State (IS) was 36 hours. For such content to be disrupted effectively, she claimed that this figure needed to be reduced to one to two hours. This has since come to be known as the ‘golden window’: if terrorist material can be detected and removed within one to two hours, its spread will be prevented.

VOX-Pol Blog Post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

VOX-Pol Blog post.

It is relatively easy to identify tens of thousands of social media users who have an interest in violent ideologies, but very difficult to figure out which users are worth watching. For students of extremist movements and those working to counter violent extremism online, deciphering the signal amid the noise can prove incredibly daunting. This paper sets out a first step in solving that problem. The authors have devised a scoring system to find out which social media accounts within a specific extremist circle were most influential and most prone to be influenced (a tendency we called exposure).