The U.S. government, acknowledging its limited success in combating Islamic extremist messaging, is recruiting tech companies, community organizations and educational groups to take the lead in disrupting online radicalization, Reuters reports.
The change in strategy, which took a step forward on Wednesday, Feb 24, when the Justice Department convened a meeting with social media firms including Facebook Inc, Twitter and Alphabet Inc's Google , comes despite what critics say is scant evidence on the effectiveness of such efforts.
The meeting was “a recognition that the government is ill-positioned and ill-equipped to counter ISIS online,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of George Washington University's Program on Extremism, said after attending the event, using an acronym for the Islamic State group.
The federal government is not best placed to counter extremist online recruitment efforts with messaging of its own, said George Selim, director of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) office that coordinates the government’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) activities.
The goal now, he said, is to help “communities and young people to amplify their own messages.”
Those messages stem from so-called "counter-narrative" programs underway at schools and community groups that have varying degrees of government support, according to government officials and private sector experts.
Past campaigns by the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to thwart extremist propaganda globally were widely regarded as too reliant on fear-based rhetoric and graphic imagery to be effective. But whether the new joint effort with the private sector will fare better remains unclear, say experts in countering extremism.
Facebook last year partnered with British research group Demos to examine the impact of "counter-messaging" against hate speech in four European countries.
The study, released in October, concluded it was “extremely difficult to calculate with any degree of precision” whether such efforts have a real impact on long-term attitudes or offline behavior.
One of the new programs, funded partly by Facebook and multiple government agencies, underwrites “peer-to-peer” (P2P) college courses that teach students to create their own anti-militant messaging.
Facebook declined to say how much it was investing in the program, though Selim described Facebook’s overall investment in CVE initiatives as “very significant.”
