Countering ISIS social media offensive not impossible, says expert

Social media has become a popular vector for Islamic jihadists to spread their message and entice recruits, as we’ve seen recently with ISIS’s use of Twitter to lure young men and women from Britain and Canada to Syria.

But an argument has raged in intelligence circles on how to counter social media’s power, whether it’s even possible or even desirable.

The co-author of a recent report by the Brookings Institution study on ISIS’s use of Twitter argues it’s not only possible but also effective.

J.M Berger, a research fellow at the Washington-based think tank, said Twitter’s recent crackdown on accounts related to ISIS and its supporters did much to degrade its ability to reach outside the group’s smaller community.

But there’s been little discussion on the topic among the companies that operate social-media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Google Plus, government and others, including free-speech advocates and those working to counter violent extremism, Berger told Yahoo Canada News.

“What really needs to happen is the stakeholders in this … all need to get together in a room and really have an airing of this issue,” said Berger, whose book on ISIS is coming out this month. “I think the main obstacle to that happening right now is the social media companies.”

The research report for Brookings by Berger and Jonathon Morgan analyzed thousands of ISIS-related Twitter accounts, estimating the group and its friends had 46,000 and perhaps as many as 90,000 accounts in the main sampling period between September and late December 2014.

Their research coincided with a major push by Twitter to suspend accounts tied to ISIS. They analyzed the languages used, subject matter, embedded geo-location information, retweeting patterns and the presence of app- and bot-generated tweets.

When it comes to social media, Berger hates the “whack-a-mole” analogy, used he says by those who think it’s fruitless to even try to root out the jihadists’ message. Berger said the position has not been backed by hard evidence.

“It’s been a battle of opinions for a long time without any data to inform it.”

Attacking ISIS social-media message does work, says analyst

His research suggests attacking ISIS’s social media presence works.

“In a very broad sense we talked about the fact that the suspensions that are currently going on are having a detrimental effect on ISIS’s ability to carry out its strategies,” Berger said.

“There’s a pretty substantial presence of ISIS supporters on Twitter and their content continues to be available, but they’ve lost the ability to broadcast that content out into a wider audience and that’s a pretty significant change.”

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The data showed Twitter’s large-scale account suspensions have a substantial impact on how well ISIS’s social-media network can achieve its goals, Berger said.

“Nobody’s trying to completely remove them from the platform,” he said. “If they really wanted to, they could probably knock it down to a couple hundred accounts and keep it there but it would require resources and a commitment that they’re not interested in making for various reasons.”

While U.S.-headquartered social-media companies co-operate with law enforcement when courts compel them, Berger said politicians have been frustrated they are not more aggressive at excising error-related content.
The response from companies like Twitter is they don’t actively monitor content but rely on reports from other users when something violates the content rules contained in the platform’s terms and conditions.

The problem, he said, is they have not been forthcoming on how they apply those content rules.

“They’re often not very transparent about those decisions. The issue is they don’t want to talk about how they make decisions for themselves and what standards they hold for themselves.”

Twitter’s content rules say simply that users “may not publish or post direct, specific threats of violence against others.”

The latest version of Facebook’s terms and conditions is a little more detailed:

“Safety is Facebook’s top priority. We remove content and may escalate to law enforcement when we perceive a genuine risk of physical harm, or a direct threat to public safety. You may not credibly threaten others, or organize acts of real-world violence.

“Organizations with a record of terrorist or violent criminal activity are not allowed to maintain a presence on our site. We also prohibit promoting, planning or celebrating any of your actions if they have, or could, result in financial harm to others, including theft and vandalism.”

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Like Twitter, it relies on reports from its 1.3-billion-member user community to expose content that breaks the rules. It has investigative teams in Dublin, Hyderabad, India, Austin, Tex., and Menlo Park, Calif. Terror-related issues are among the top priority for review, though the company would not say how many reports it receives each year.

"There is no place for terrorists on Facebook,” a spokeswoman said via email. “We work aggressively to ensure that we do not have terrorists or terror groups using the site, and we also remove any content that praises or supports terrorism."

Twitter’s press office did not respond to requests from Yahoo Canada News to elaborate on its treatment of terror-related content.

Berger said it’s understandable social-media companies want to hold their policies closely — it’s been suggested spelling them out would make it easier for terror groups like ISIS to get around them — and to control content on their platforms without government input.

“But at the same time they’re asking us to just trust them. I’m not sure that’s appropriate.”

Berger said they don’t want to get into policing values on their platforms.

“I’m sympathetic to that. But at the same time there’s an illusion of free speech on these platforms.

“All of these companies suspend users all the time for reasons that they don’t have to disclose and they’re not accountable to anybody for what they do. So this goes beyond just counter-terrorism issues. There’s questions about who gets targeted for suspensions.”

Some have contended stamping out jihadi social-media activity would deprive security services of valuable “open-source” intelligence on groups like ISIS. Berger doubts that, saying even an aggressive approach would help shut down wider propaganda efforts but likely would leave up many less active accounts.

“A lot of these small accounts have been relatively untouched. They’re still out there and they’re still providing us with information.”

It’s a strategy Facebook seems to have used, cracking down on ISIS fan pages and community groups supporting the movement.

“So individual ISIS supporters are still on their but it’s very much harder for them to congregate and attract new recruits. I think the same dynamic is starting to be seen on Twitter now.”

Berger said ISIS and its supporters won’t disappear from Twitter, but a sustained effort to suspend accounts can cripple its ability to get hashtags trending, having its tweets picked up by third parties or getting material to the top of search results.

Stakeholders need to reconcile their divergent interests, the Brookings report said. Social media companies want to protect their users’ privacy and their own right to manage content; spy agencies want to maintain a window into jihadis’ thinking; those fighting extremism want a channel to project their anti-extremist message to ISIS supporters who are more accessible than they would have been in the pre-Internet age.

Balanced against that is ISIS’s strategy of using social media to encourage so-called lone-wolf attacks, such as the killings in Ottawa and Quebec last fall, the report said.

But without the passage of problematic legislation, it’s up to platform operators to take the lead, Berger pointed out in the report.

“This point needs to be crystal clear: social media companies can and do control speech on their platforms. No user of a mainstream social media service enjoys an environment of complete freedom.”