Online Extremism in the Middle East
By: Damian Radcliffe
Tags: Facebook, Middle East, Twitter, Social Media, Extremism

Online Extremism in the Middle East

Law Enforcement, Government’s and the Platforms themselves are tackling this issue

This is an adapted extract from Social Media in the Middle East: 2019 in review is authored by Damian Radcliffe and Hadil Abuhmaid, at the University of Oregon.

The past year saw considerable energy expended on tackling — and addressing — online extremism in the Middle East. Stakeholders involved in these efforts included law enforcement, the judiciary and social media platforms.

Here are some examples of these efforts which caught our eye:

Social Networks clamp down

In May, Twitter reported that in the second half of 2018, it had removed 166,513 accounts for violations related to the promotion of terrorism.

“Of those suspensions, 91% consisted of accounts flagged by internal, purpose-built technological tools,” they wrote, adding:

“The trend we are observing year-on-year is a steady decrease in terrorist organizations attempting to use our service.”

A few months later, in July, Facebook published a blog post that explained their efforts to identify and take action against terrorist groups online.

Efforts include developing a shared database of digital fingerprints that allows them to safely share known terrorist images and video propaganda with their partner companies, which will help in identifying terrorist content.

“When terrorists misuse the internet, they often upload the same piece of content to multiple platforms to maximize their reach. To disrupt this behavior we jointly developed a shared industry database of “hashes” — or digital fingerprints — that allows us to safely share known terrorist images and video propaganda with partner companies. This enables us to more quickly identify and take action against potential terrorist content on our respective platforms.”

On-going challenges

AP reported at various points throughout the year on how Facebook was auto-generating pages promoting Islamic State and al-Qaida.

“Facebook concedes that its systems are not perfect,” AP wrote in May, “but says it’s making improvements.”

Like other tech companies, Facebook relies heavily on AI, artificial intelligence, to automatically “weed out violent posts” before they can be published.

“After making heavy investments, we are detecting and removing terrorism content at a far higher success rate than even two years ago,” the company said in a statement. “We don’t claim to find everything and we remain vigilant in our efforts against terrorist groups around the world.”

“Facebook would like us to believe that its magical algorithms are somehow scrubbing its website of extremist content,” they quoted John Kostyack, executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, as saying in September. “Yet those very same algorithms are auto-generating pages with titles like ‘I Love Islamic State,’ which are ideal for terrorists to use for networking and recruiting.”

Screengrab from 7 May 2019. Via AP.

Law Enforcement efforts

A court in Abu Dhabi sentenced a Filipino man to 10 years imprisonment for using social media to promote “the ideology of terrorist organizations.”

The charges included setting up and running several accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Telegram that urge young people to join and provide financial support to terrorist groups and their affiliates around the world.

More widely, Europol, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation, announced in November that they had shut down a number of Islamic State-linked servers. The targeted servers contained content that included “propaganda videos, publications and social media accounts supporting terrorism and violent extremism.”

“Over 26,000 items… were flagged by authorities as being terrorist propaganda,” NPR reported. “Europol, the European Union’s law enforcement agency, sent those items to several online service providers for removal.”

“For the time being, for as far as we know, IS is not present on the internet anymore. And we will see how fast, if ever, they will regain surface,” said Eric Van Der Sypt, a spokesman for the Belgian prosecutor’s office.”

Although most of this content was found on the Telegram app, Google, Twitter, Instagram, and Telegram were among the nine operators who collaborated with the operation.

U.S. State Department and Silicon Valley

Also in November, Twitter announced that they suspended content affiliated with groups the U.S. State Department considers Foreign Terrorist Organizations, like Hamas and Hezbollah, following a request from Congress.

The suspension included closing the official English and Arabic language accounts of Hamas, Hamas television channel, Al-Quds News Network, and Hezbollah television channel and news service Al-Manar, in addition to several accounts of Hamas and Hezbollah affiliated activists.

Earlier in the year, both the New York Times and Bellingcat had written about how Hezbollah had been successfully by-passing efforts by social media companies to promote their message and target potential supporters.