Social Media and Combating Terrorism
Terrorist attacks have go an ordinary happening in today'due south world. The more they happen, the less affected we go and the less willing nosotros become to practise something about it. Though, if y'all give information technology a little thought, you might realize that terrorists are a Facebook user or a Google search abroad from you, your household, and your loved ones. Indeed, terrorists are all over social media, using information technology to achieve the most terrifying objectives.
Social media plays a tremendous office in reaching out to every bit many people as possible at a low cost. This is an incentive for almost any type of system, including the less legitimate ones, such as those perpetrating terrorism. According to an article in The Telegraph, terrorist organizations similar ISIS and Al-Qaeda have totally embraced the spider web and are using it at total chapters for propaganda, recruitment, and fundraising.
Social Media Action
Reportedly, ISIS has a very open approach past being active on almost of the social media platforms. According to an article entitled "Terror on Twitter," P.West. Singer and Emerson Brooking wrote that ISIS' posting activeness has reached a peak of almost 40,000 tweets in one day, in 2014, during their invasion of the Mosul urban center in Iraq, when they simultaneously launched a Twitter hashtag campaign #AllEyesonISIS. Content such equally video and images is uploaded daily by foot soldiers and then shared globally.
In contrast, Al-Qaeda has kept a more reserved presence on social media that relies more on anonymization techniques. The same article mentions:
Within hours, images of ISIS boorishness spread throughout the Arab earth, sowing fearfulness among Mosul's residents and defenders. The social-media campaign gave an air of inevitability to the looming seizure of the urban center, and the atrocities that would follow. Despite the fact that they outnumbered the attacking ISIS forcefulness by fifteen-to-1, the Iraqi army units defending Mosul disintegrated and fled. A militia of no more than than 2,000 ISIS fighters captured a city of 1.5 million.
Another article entitled "Social Media, Recruitment, Allegiance and the Islamic Country" by Scott Gates and Sukanya Podder tries to render how the terrorists are using social media nowadays. It seems that ISIS has a media bureau, Al Hayat, that has developed "constructive virtual propaganda machinery".They are constantly releasing videos and other materials that show insights into the group'south lifestyle. In some content published, 1 can meet troubling images of children holding decapitated heads, whereas, in others, you lot see soldiers property Nutella jars "to demonstrate familiarity with Western lifestyles." The bulletin that they want to convey is usually almost"governance, justice and new construction"past outlining the wrongdoings of the enemy and the lawfulness of ISIS. They are proving semi-professional skills by using "video rather than text." The group "takes total reward of the linguistic skills of members, and makes good utilize of music – all of which appears to resonate with western youth culture."The authors conclude that the online campaigns carried out past ISIS are "sustained by meaning manpower. Linguistic and technical skills are conspicuously axiomatic."
ISIS has completely embraced the modern techniques of social media marketing and has taken activities to a whole new level, a level that has non been reached, to this moment, by any other terrorist organization. One of the chief achievements is that they have managed to expand their operations fashion beyond their territory through focused, systematic, and efficient propaganda. Moreover, they manage to recruit adepts from both the Middle East but as well Western countries, profiles that have more than differences than similarities in terms of incentives for embracing such a direction, as revealed by this article. Usually, the social media campaigns developed by terrorists are used for recruitment (forums, targeted recruitment), intimidation (mass execution videos), coordination (the use of tools that provide anonymity), and propaganda (press releases, tweets, etc.).
On the other hand, there is an intense effort from governments, social media companies, and many others to fight confronting online terrorism. As for now, it seems that the terrorists still hold the upper hand, past being able to ever make the first move while taking advantage of key rights such every bit freedom of speech and privacy. Therefore, the fight confronting online terrorism is on a developing trend as more and more organizations and governments adopt at least one fighting method.
There are different ways of fighting terrorism online, and, in particular, on social media, each ane of them existence more than or less suitable for diverse situations. There is no best or worst solution only multiple methods can be applied in changing circumstances.
Methods for Fighting Online Terrorism
In no detail social club:
Content filtering
Technically speaking, content filtering is done by the company owning the social media platform. Almost all of them, especially the most pop ones, provide a way of reporting calumniating content and some of them too have anti-terrorism policies. According to some sources such as morningconsult.com and "Terror on Twitter," YouTube cooperates with highly active human being-rights protection groups past making them "trusted flaggers" in order to flag ISIS content.
Twitter has banned "indirect threats of violence" and specified in their policy that service providers take action on whatsoever threat or promotion of violence. Facebook proactively removes known jihadists from its service and can "remove content, disable accounts, and work with law enforcement" in cases where at that place appears to be a "genuine risk of physical harm or direct threats to public prophylactic." They also have mechanisms allowing all users to flag posts from other users that they find suspicious. At this level of shared policing, all of united states of america can contribute by reporting anything suspicious and making the world a better place.
Counter-attack through positive campaigns
The main concept hither is to effort to fill social media with positive messages aimed at countering the disinformation spread past terrorists. According to "Terror on Twitter," the U.South. authorities manages a series of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr accounts, such as the "ThinkAgain TurnAway" series, to highlight and counter misinformation spread by ISIS. There are also multiple other examples in this expanse from other states.
Monitor and track
This is an action typically carried-out past law-enforcement. Government agencies tin can become input for their actions either through "suspicious" reporting washed on social media platforms and their users or through using specialized software that detects dangerous profiles or events through special algorithms.
Governments accept started recently to build specialized teams of experts to deal with the new threats. In January 2016, The White House appear a new task force aimed at combating the spread of terrorist networks online "Countering Fierce Extremism Task Force." Although the communication is non very articulate on the exact time to come deportment of the grouping, provisioned activities such equally research, assay, technical assistance, communications, and interventions are pretty much hinting at the areas and type of actions that volition be covered.
According to another article from The Guardian, "The British regular army is creating a special force of Facebook warriors, skilled in psychological operations and use of social media to engage in unconventional warfare in the information age." Once more, the available information is not very clear on what are their verbal tasks, but on the British Army website, you can discover some basic data together with the fact that they have designated a department called Media Operations and Civil Affairs.
Furthermore, a controversial approach comes from Israel, a country deeply confronted with terrorist activities, that uses social media in trying to foresee futurity terrorist activities based on "especially adult algorithms to monitor the social media accounts" as stated past The Economist. This way, they are able to build a list of potential suspects, and in some past cases were actually able to finish terrorists earlier they deployed any set on. A similar initiative has been taken past EUROPOL who established a section chosen European union Cyberspace Referral Unit of measurement. According to their first and only annual report, their job is to coordinate and share the identification tasks (flagging) of terrorist and violent extremist activities, to conduct out and support referrals chop-chop in close cooperation with the manufacture, and to support the EU member states in the same issues. The study mentions that they have removed 8949 types of content from the web.
Hacking
An unorthodox approach to fighting terrorism was adopted by Anonymous, the famous hacking organization. In belatedly 2015, after the Paris attacks, Anonymous alleged war on ISIS. Information technology'due south not the offset or the last bulletin posted by Anonymous on this topic but real actions have also been noticed. According to a video published past Al Jazeera, 39,000 Twitter accounts were uncovered by them and most of them closed. In other cases, DDoS and other hacking attacks were reported targeting ISIS websites.
Legislation
There are besides initiatives, although in incipient phases, of regulating the way social media platforms should respond to the terrorist threat. A pecker entitled "Requiring Reporting of Online Terrorist Activity Act" was reintroduced in the US Senate in December 2015. As described on the Congress website:
This pecker requires an electronic communication or remote computing service company that obtains actual cognition of terrorist activity to report relevant facts and circumstances to appropriate government.
The bill was dropped in the past due to opposition from tech giants under the justification that it "would turn individual social media companies into government enforcers," as stated past the morningconsult.com commodity mentioned higher up. Nevertheless, new efforts are made now to revive the beak and pass it.
We might conclude that social media has become a battlefield, following on the trend of overall cyberspace, that has even been alleged an operational domain by NATO in June 2016, joining the other already existing four: air, sea, land, and space. We are now assisting a tremendous arms race on social media where platform owners are playing an increasingly important role. Futurity policies in this area need a lot of attention and coherent development, as social media, as a disruptive innovation, has already started revolutionizing the media and internet industries. In the fight against terrorism, the right residual between law-enforcement, privacy, and freedom of speech must be accomplished and protected.
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