Facebook Doesn’t Want to Discourage Extremism | Schools as Ransomware Targets | Who Are the Three Percenters?, and more

Who Are the Three Percenters? What Experts Say  (Noah Feit, Charlotte Observer)
On Monday, the Columbia Police Department confirmed one of its officers had a Three Percenters sticker on his personal vehicle. That officer was taken off patrol and placed on administrative duty while the department conducts a review. But who are the Three Percenters, and why did the presence of their logo on a police officer’s car cause an uproar? The Three Percenters are a right-wing militia organization who have recently targeted political leftists, Muslims and immigrants, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The Three Percenters logo includes a Roman numeral III, often surrounded by a field of thirteen stars. After forming in 2008 on a blog run by an anti-government extremist involved in the militia movement, Three Percenters have established a track record of criminal activity ranging from weapons violations to terrorist plots and attacks, the Anti-Defamation League said. On June 25, the Canadian government listed Three Percenters as a terrorist organization, calling it a ideologically motivated violent extremist group. It is considered an anti-government militia movement, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Threat to U.K. from Hostile States Could Be as Bad as Terrorism, Says MI5 Chief  (Dan Sabbagh, Guardian)
The chief of MI5 is to warn that the activities of China, Russia and other hostile states could have as large an impact on the public as terrorism, marking a significant shift in emphasis from the UK’s domestic spy agency. Giving his annual threat update on Wednesday, Ken McCallum is expected to say that the British public will have to “build the same public awareness and resilience to state threats that we have done over the years on terrorism”. But while the threat from Russia, as demonstrated by the poisoning of the Skripals in Salisbury, is familiar to the British public – the spy chief will argue that threats that typically come from China are not. McCallum will say that universities and researchers risk “having their discoveries stolen or copied” if they are not vigilant and that businesses could be “hollowed out by the loss of advantage they’ve worked painstakingly to build”. “Given half a chance, hostile actors will short-circuit years of patient British research or investment. This is happening at scale. And it affects us all. UK jobs, UK public services, UK futures,” McCallum will say.

Five Years on, Nice Remains Haunted By Memory of Bastille Day Truck Attack  (France24)
For most French people, Bastille Day is synonymous with military pomp and parties, but in the southern city of Nice the country’s national holiday also conjures up visions of horror. On Wednesday, the Mediterranean city will pause to mark five years since a man drove a 19-tonne truck into a crowd of people celebrating Bastille Day on the waterfront, killing 86 people. Dozens of nationalities were among the victims who were out to enjoy a fireworks show on the palm-fringed Promenade des Anglais with friends and family when Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel struck. The Tunisian-born assailant, who is believed to have been spurred by jihadist propaganda, was shot dead by police after a two-kilometre rampage. Fifteen of his victims were minors, with the youngest aged just two-and-a-half. At the city’s Lenval hospital, around 300 children are still being monitored by psychiatrists for the trauma suffered from that night, with around 100 needing regular consultations. “Five years on, we still have patients who have recurring nightmares, which are flashbacks to the attack,” Florence Askenazy, head of the service, told AFP. “These are primary school children who witnessed severed limbs and other terrible things when they were little, who have nightmares about heads being cut off and trucks coming from all directions,” she explained.

German Spy Chief Warns of Islamic State’s Strength  (Ben Knight, DW)
The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, has given a rare interview specifically to warn that despite appearances, terrorism remains a real threat to world order, even 20 years after 9/11. Speaking to the Süddeutsche Zeitung on Monday, Bruno Kahl said that though Europe and the US had not seen any more major terrorist attacks like those of two decades ago, “Islamist terrorism has developed further and cost very many human lives. The number of terrorist actors and the danger they pose has increased.”   There have of course been major successes in the fight against the Islamic State in the past few years — especially the 2019 killing of the group’s self-proclaimed caliph, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and the destruction of the “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq as a quasi-state entity. But since then, said Kahl, IS has turned into a decentralized network, much like al-Qaida, whose suborganizations “are even spreading out.”  This isn’t exactly news, according to Mirna El Masri, a radicalization and terrorism researcher at the Hamburg-based German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA). “There had been indications in 2019 after the loss of its territories that IS had strengthened considerably,” she told DW.

Why Facebook Really, Really Doesn’t Want to Discourage Extremism  (Steve Rathje, Jay Van Bavel and Sander van der Linden, Washington Post)
Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported Facebook executives allegedly shut down internal research showing the platform increased political polarization and declined to make changes that might make the platform less divisive. Why might Facebook be reluctant to reduce polarization on its platform? Our study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might offer an answer. We analyzed nearly 3 million U.S.-based tweets and Facebook posts to examine what social media posts that go “viral” have in common. We specifically looked at political posts, including those by members of Congress or left- and right-leaning media outlets. The results were stark. The most viral posts tended to be about the opposing political party. Facebook posts and tweets about one’s political out-group (that is, the party opposed to one’s own) were shared about twice as often as those about one’s own political group. Posts about the opposition were almost exclusively negative. Furthermore, each additional word about the opposing group (for instance, in a Republican’s post, that might include “Democrat,” “leftist,” or “Biden”) in a social media post was associated with a 67 percent increase in social media shares.