• Racists Are Recruiting. Watch Your White Sons.

    Raising teenagers can be terrifying. Squishy little babies become awkward hormonal creatures who question their parents’ authority at every turn. Joanna Schroeder writes that she expected that. “What I didn’t predict was that my sons’ adolescence would include being drawn to the kind of online content that right-wing extremists use to recruit so many young men,” she writes. “Unfortunately, extremists know how to find new recruits in the very place our sons spend so much of their time: online. And too often, they’re more aware than we are of how vulnerable young white men are to radicalization.”

  • Senate Intel Committee: Russia Used Social Media to support Donald Trump “at the direction of the Kremlin”

    On Tuesday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a new report, titled Russia’s Use of Social Media. It is the second volume released in the Committee’s bipartisan investigation into Russia’s attempts to interfere with the 2016 U.S. election. The new report examines Russia’s efforts to use social media to sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election, led by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA). The Committee found that the IRA sought to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election by harming Hillary Clinton’s chances of success and supporting Donald Trump at the direction of the Kremlin.  The Committee found that IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump to the detriment of Secretary Clinton’s campaign. 

  • Independent Adviser Calls for Overhaul of U.K. Counter-Extremism Strategy

    The U.K. government’s independent advisor on extremism is calling for a complete overhaul of the government’s strategy – recommending a new taskforce led by the Home Secretary. The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism on Monday, 7 October, published its findings and recommendations in a new report, Challenging Hateful Extremism.

  • Independent Adviser Calls for Overhaul of U.K. Counter-Extremism Strategy

    The U.K. government’s independent advisor on extremism is calling for a complete overhaul of the government’s strategy – recommending a new taskforce led by the Home Secretary. The U.K. Commission for Countering Extremism on Monday, 7 October, published its findings and recommendations in a new report, Challenging Hateful Extremism.

  • Free Speech Is Killing Us

    There has never been a bright line between word and deed. Yet, for years, the founders of Facebook and Twitter and 4chan and Reddit tried to pretend that the noxious speech prevalent on those platforms wouldn’t metastasize into physical violence. Andrew Marantz writes in the New York Times that in the early years of this decade, back when people associated social media with Barack Obama or the Arab Spring, Twitter executives referred to their company as “the free-speech wing of the free-speech party.” “No one believes that anymore,” Marantz writes. Marantz says that after spending the past few years embedded as a reporter with the trolls and bigots and propagandists who are experts at converting fanatical memes into national policy, “I no longer have any doubt that the brutality that germinates on the internet can leap into the world of flesh and blood.” He adds: “The question is where this leaves us. Noxious speech is causing tangible harm. Yet this fact implies a question so uncomfortable that many of us go to great lengths to avoid asking it. Namely, what should we — the government, private companies or individual citizens — be doing about it?”

  • U.K. Government Drive to Tackle Extremism Is “Inadequate”

    The drive to tackle extremism in the United Kingdom is failing because the government’s response is “inadequate” and “unfocused,” according to an official report published Monday. Extremist activity is contributing to a climate of censorship and fear, limiting expression, religion and belief while those countering it receive little support. The report warns that hateful, hostile and supremacist beliefs are increasingly visible in the U.K. today. “The Far Right’s narratives of a racial or cultural threat to “natives” from “aliens” have been making their way into the mainstream. “As are Islamists’ ideas for defending a single politicized and communal Muslim identity against the West’s corrupting influence. And the Far Left’s conflation of anti-imperialist and antisemitism”, it said.

  • Researchers Trying to Prevent a Repeat of 2016's Election Misinformation in 2020 Are Struggling Thanks to a Lack of Data from Facebook

    Facebook’s promises of sharing detailed amounts of data with researchers and academics to enable them to study and flag disinformation on the site ahead of the 2020 campaign seem to have fallen short, according to a new report from The New York Times. In October 2017, Facebook admitted that 126 million Americans had likely seen Russian misinformation over a two-year period up till August 2017. “Disinformation is still rife on the platform and is continuing to grow,” Mary Hanbury writes. “Last week, research from the University of Oxford showed Facebook was the number one global platform of choice for political parties and governments to spread fake news.”

  • Disinformation for Hire: How Russian PR Firms Plant Stories for Companies in U.K. News Outlets, Social Media

    The staples of Russian misinformation campaigns—fake news and social media propaganda—are turning up in a new place: the private sector. Jeff John Roberts writes in Fortune that for a small fee, companies can pay Russian operatives to boost their image or smear their competitors, employing some of the same tactics used by the Kremlin to disrupt the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “The range of services offered by the Russian PR firms is startling,” “Not only do the firms deploy fake accounts on social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn, but they offer a service to plant news articles in English-language media outlets.”

  • White Supremacy Has Triggered a Terrorism Panic

    Our collective response to terrorism seems to swing on a pendulum between rank complacency and terrified myth-making. In January 2014, U.S. President Barack Obama dismissed the Islamic State as al Qaeda’s “JV team.” But by September of that year, after the group had captured Mosul in Iraq and launched a genocidal campaign of slaughter against the Yazidis, he started bombing it. A similar dynamic can be observed in the case of white supremacy today. This is not “to suggest that the threat of white supremacy is not real or that we should be complacent about it,” Simon Cottee writes. “Of course it is real, and of course we need to indict and seriously punish those who have committed or are plotting to commit terrorist atrocities in the name of white supremacy.” But we should resist the urge to treat white supremacy as “a mythical monster against which to signal our moral virtue”: “White supremacy is not a monolith endangering our children and societies, but we might just make it into one by overinflating it into precisely this.”

  • Digital Menace: Using Social Media to Manufacture Consensus, Automate Suppression, and Undermine Trust

    Over the past three years, the Project on Computational Propaganda at Oxford University has monitored the global organization of social media manipulation by governments and political parties. The Project’s 2019 report analyzes the trends of computational propaganda and the evolving tools, capacities, strategies, and resources.

  • The Global Disinformation Order: Excerpts from a New Report

    Around the world, government actors are using social media to manufacture consensus, automate suppression, and undermine trust in the liberal international order. Social media, which was once heralded as a force for freedom and democracy, has come under increasing scrutiny for its role in amplifying disinformation, inciting violence, and lowering levels of trust in media and democratic institutions.

  • Tech Fight against Online Extremism Gets Overhaul

    Facebook fulfilled a long-standing demand from policymakers and advocacy groups this week when Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that a coalition of the country’s most powerful tech corporations will be formalizing its counterterrorism efforts into an independent organization with a dedicated staff. As the companies face ramped-up criticism from regulators and lawmakers worldwide, they are expanding the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), which they originally formed to deal with Islamic terrorism online in 2017. The founding members were Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Microsoft.

  • Innocent Users Have the Most to Lose in the Rush to Address Extremist Speech Online

    Big online platforms tend to brag about their ability to filter out violent and extremist content at scale, but those same platforms refuse to provide even basic information about the substance of those removals. How do these platforms define terrorist content? What safeguards do they put in place to ensure that they don’t over-censor innocent people in the process? Again and again, social media companies are unable or unwilling to answer the questions. Facebook Head of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert claimed that more than 99 percent of terrorist content posted on Facebook is deleted by the platform’s automated tools, but the company has consistently failed to say how it determines what constitutes a terrorist⁠—or what types of speech constitute terrorist speech.

  • Information and Democracy—A Perilous Relationship

    In the 1997 James Bond film “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the villain is Elliot Carver, head of a media conglomerate who has come to believe that information is a more powerful weapon than military force. He blackmails senior British leaders and ultimately tries to spark a war between China and Britain to bring his ally to power in Beijing. At one point in the film, Carver stands underneath massive television screens in the headquarters of his media empire, addressing Bond: “We’re both men of action,” he tells Bond, “but your era…is passing. Words are the new weapons, satellites the new artillery…Caesar had his legions, Napoleon had his armies. I have my divisions—TV, news, magazines.” Fast-forward twenty years, and this scenario appears to be becoming reality. Using techniques far more advanced than those available to Bond villains in the 1990s, today’s practitioners of what a new RAND report terms “hostile social manipulation” employ targeted social media campaigns, sophisticated forgeries, cyberbullying and harassment of individuals, distribution of rumors and conspiracy theories, and other tools and approaches to cause damage to the target state.

  • Women’s March Votes Out Board Member for Anti-Semitic Tweets

    Zahra Billoo, the executive director of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, was dismissed from the board of directors of the Women’s March on Wednesday, only two days after she was appointed to the board on Monday. “We found some of her public statements incompatible with the values and mission of the organization,” the board said. Billoo has called herself a “proud anti-Zionist” and said that she does not believe Israel has a right to exist. She also has accused Israel of committing war crimes “as a hobby,” and wrote: “the Israeli Defense Forces, or the IDF, are no better than ISIS. They are both genocidal terrorist organizations,” and that “racist Zionists who support Apartheid Israel” scares her more than “the mentally ill young people the #FBI recruits to join ISIS.”