David Fidler has a new brief for the Council on Foreign Relations examining U.S. public and private sector efforts to counter the online propaganda of the Islamic State, a militant group also known as ISIS and ISIL. He finds that there is a lot of uncoordinated activity but not much evidence that it is doing any good.
“Radicalization usually involves more than consuming extremist tweets”
Many policymakers argue that online propaganda helps to radicalize young people. Fidler points out that there isn’t much strong evidence to support this claim. Internet-based communication is plausibly much less important than ISIS’s wins (and losses) on the ground in recruiting converts for the cause. The United Kingdom has put a lot of work into removing terrorist content from the Internet. However, the U.K. remains a major recruiting base for ISIS. It’s hard to evaluate the success or failure of programs such as this, and it could be that the U.K. situation would actually be worse in the absence of these censorship efforts. However, there’s no real evidence to support this theory. Other proposed countermeasures — such as responding with counter-narratives and counter-propaganda — don’t have a demonstrably better track record. While Fidler doesn’t say this, it is plausible that policymakers fixate on Internet-based responses to ISIS recruitment strategies because they are visible, politically salient and relatively cheap. Unfortunately, this does not mean that they are effective.
Censorship sits awkwardly with free-speech values
Fidler points out that both public and private efforts to remove terrorist content can clash with free-speech values. This is most obviously a problem for the United States, which has been highly reluctant to engage in censorship, given the willingness of the Supreme Court to strike down laws that could impinge directly on free speech. Accordingly, the United States has effectively delegated out much of the job of censorship to private businesses such as Google’s YouTube and Facebook, which are allowed (and indeed encouraged by laws such as the Communications Decency Act) to have their own codes of conduct over which content they will host and which content they will take down. The government, furthermore, sometimes requests that companies take down content. In principle, these requests are nonbinding, but in practice they may be hard for businesses to ignore.
Read the full piece at The Washington Post.