[inaudible conversations] good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this panel, disrupting isis online, the challenge of combating online radical, this is to the congressional internet pockets and hosted by the congressional internet caucus. We would like to thank the cochairs, Bob Goodlatte and senator john sthune for hosting us today. We talk about salient topics to the internet and policy, and likes to come out to events for the summer. We have several excellent panelists with us. From the center for democracy, roughshod hussein from the department of justice, countering violent extremism over there and Shamus Hughes on the program for extremism at George Washington university for cyber and homeland security. I am a fellow at the internet law and policy foundry, a fellow at the congressional internet caucus. Lets get started. Lets get a brief overview and jump into it and get into what is the real issue with extremists online, what role do platforms like facebook, and google play in this and what is the right way to be approaching the issue of dealing with extremists content online and recruitment for terrorist groups abroad. So as you may have seen, the social media platforms like twitter and facebook especially in their early years been quite in favor of leaving their platforms, places for Free Expression, adamant supporters of that but gradually we have seen that being taken advantage of through out shabaab in somalia, and al qaeda and the Islamic State using the platform even more actively than that, to a totally different level. Now the platforms are facing pressure on multiple sides, and the users to do something more to take the content out, not something you want to see every day, something that we want spreading around because it is generally effective in recruiting people to go abroad and join these causes. Shamus has been tracking this phenomenon over time. When did this start . How are platforms being used . What are the groups doing . In the early ages when we looked at terrorist groups online, the forms that a dozen or so we worried about, as the internet shifted to more open programs like twitter and facebook so did improvement. If you look at the number of individuals arrested for isis related charges, 85 individuals since march 2014, and they are going online in the demographic, and moving back over to telegram another platform, it is conducive to them to recruit. They use it as grooming. Over the summer the program on extremism at George Washington did a six month study of isis recruit online mostly focusing on americans but also englishlanguage speakers. We look at 1000 accounts on a daily basis. Of those we see them as a grooming online so we watch a young woman from the midwest with questions about her faith and an isis recruiter realized she was naive and answered questions in a nonjudged way. And would introduce the isis narrative, they use it as spotters to recruit people, and logistical support, an individual like a 19yearold kid from chicago when he is picked up at Ohare Airport and siblings planning to go to join isis, they went through his stuff and realized he had four numbers, and the contacts he made on twitter and lowers the bar to be able to meet a radicalized recruiter online. The last way to do it is the devil on the shoulder, aching people on. And the numbers pale in comparison to any form of conversation online, you talk about 44,000 twitter accounts, englishlanguage accounts online, some are bought and some are not, they are using the online environment. The other thing is it is not as if there are recruits that are joining. The fact there is a physical space and the caliphate is a driver for people, twitter, telegram, things like that helped facilitate that recruitment but the reason people decide to become radicalized and join groups like this, in the us, when you see people who have been arrested, communities dont radicalized in america, individuals do. We dont have pockets like you would have in some european countries. Here if you find a likeminded individual you are usually trying to find that online. I believe it right there. Assad, you can tell us how the department of justice is approaching the phenomena and and how you are working to combat that. It is a threat we take very seriously. First priority at the Justice Department is to protect the American People from attacks, and what we are seeing isil do online is get sophisticated techniques. Seamus talked about some of the approaches they have used. They have done Something Different than previous groups, they have adopted crowdsourcing models for which they encourage anyone anywhere to go out and commit attacks against innocent people. We have to be successful 100 of the time, isil is overwhelmingly rejected recruiting millions of people around the world, they reach out to an audience of 1. 6 billion muslims. Even if they are successful in a minuscule number of those cases you still have a problem of 20,000, 30,000 foreign fighters, and the problems of isis getting followers all around the world. Very adept at using different techniques, targeting different audiences in different languages, they tried to reach out to disaffected youth and offer a sense of purpose, sense of belonging, they use a combination of strength and warmth they try to lure recruits with, since of, rotary, as twisted as it sounds they claim to be building something. We have all seen atrocities they broadcast around the world, they also put out positive messaging, i mentioned themes of, rotary and strength and warmth and claim to be building something and calling people to build something which is in their conception the caliphate, so one of the realizations we have as government is there are multiple audiences, we have to be smart using the right messengers to reach the audience. Government isnt always going to be the right messenger to reach the various audiences we are trying to reach. Roughly speaking taking a look at the audience, we have a class of fence sitters thinking about joining isil in the short term and immediate influences of family, friends and peers at a sense of cultural influencers that influence public generally and a mass audience, government may be more effective in the prevention space reaching out to people who havent bought into aspect of the propaganda or ideology, but you really need specific audiences to reach specific classes of fence sitters. That is the question we think about, perhaps they will only listen to other extremists and maybe those are not violent extremists but people extreme in their views that can persuade them to come back, that is not a role for the government to play. Who is the best audience to reach out for cultural influence . What we try to do in government is where possible message ourselves to the audiences we think we can reach, some of the common themes we have used our to highlight isils atrocities against muslim communities and also killing in big numbers, amplifying stories of people that have defected from isils former radicals, highlighting their battlefield, and have territory they can point to and say help us establish the office so we point to losses they are taking particularly in iraq and syria and exposing Living Conditions and done that under isil territories and we think it is important to work not just government but partners to disseminate positive messages the clear what the rest of us stand for and the Muslim Community stands for and to highlight positive alternatives. When someone says i really have a problem with what is happening in syria, and want to do something with it. We have got to find other paths for people to take that are constructive. We have the dual use of the internet as a platform for recruitment and engagement on the other side and also the platforms are torn between taking down violent content and threatening content and on one hand leaving up for intelligence purposes and on the other hand minimizing what they are taking down so they dont have to be the ones judging appropriate content and what is not. Tell us the response we have seen from the company than the concerns they might be considering when asked to comment on how to approach this issue. Over the past year and a half can you hear me now . Clearly over the past year and a half we have seen a huge amount of scrutiny on major Internet Companies, big social media platforms, how they are responding to the existence of socalled extremist content online. It might help to describe a little bit the Legal Framework around speech, what enables the exchange of information, and the will we all enjoy. In the us we have strong protections for the First Amendment for speech where we have very high standards for what is speech the government can say is unlawful, relevant issues in that context is a comment direct incitement to imminent lawless action or imminent violence, is it a true threat of violence or intended violence against another individual but we dont generally have broad prohibitions against hate speech and there certainly is no definition of extremist content on unlawful speech so we are in an environment where what exactly are we talking about . What speech and content are we talking about is unclear. What we are seeing a lot of companies doing trying to apply their terms of service which are variable across platforms, to remove content that gets reported to them. Internet companies, hosts are generally protected by any legal liability for speech that they are not the author of, the Communications Act ensures that if i for example tweet something defamatory about seamus, seamus can sue me if i said the comments but cant go into twitter. This law, the innovation we have seen with the internet and Online Platforms and to supporting speech online. And post and transmit speech. And to face legal liability for the speech. So also in that Law Companies are protected from liability to remove speech so this is where we see the terms of service, set standards for what speech they will accept on their platforms and a violation of their rules and standards so a lot of the platforms have rules about hate speech even though this is very often speech that is protected under the law in the us they may say they dont want to host speech that is denigrating particular group, most of them have standards against direct threats or threats of violence, facebook has a standard against dangerous organizations, they mean terrorist organizations, had seen a range of different terms on different platforms over the years and companies in response to user flags about speech that seems to violate their terms will look at content and does this go too far . Does this step over the line of what they describe to be acceptable or not acceptable on their platform . I want to hear from the rest of the panel about this balance, the opportunity of the internet platform to spread various types of speech, positive speech, the desire to control dangerous speech, hate speech, in the Research Arena how do you see that playing out . We have a fellow on extremism, and if takedown was effective and here is the take away with a caveat. The takedown of accounts reducing the number of followers that came back on twitter. There is the first part. The second part we should keep in mind, there is a built in system of resiliency, an individual like terrance mcneil, last fall, nominal 7. By the time he was arrested he was nominal 21, kicked off 14 times. Every time he came back it was 8, 9, 10. The isis echo chamber has shout out accounts, here is lone wolf, needs to be little 7, everyone follow him. There is a builtin system that says we will get written out for violating terms of service but we will help other people to make sure they get back on. From a research perspective, they clearly want more data, clearly a balancing act, whether takedown is the necessary way. I tend to be more positive on messaging than takedown. Enforcing terms of service, there are echo chambers out there about extremism, violent tweets and beheading videos and not a lot of echo chamber, there may be limited cases that can be helpful and there is some intelligence that can be communicated to companies, but for the most part i agree with seamuss view on it. Overwhelmingly isil is rejected around the world and there is a reason for that. It is because of their own actions. A lot of atrocities they are committing, the stories that have been told by people impacted by isil and other groups, all those are getting out through social media as well. Thousands of people targeted by isil have gone and joined and that is unexpectedly high for all of us because we are trying to prevent any single attack from ever happening. Important to remember these platforms provide an opportunity to put not just counter messaging but positive messaging that allows the rest of us including muslim communities to communicate what we stand for. The risk of the overbroad content policy, increasing pressure on companies to strengthen their policies, make them so more content can come down is that potentially vastly overbroad response to what ends up being as seamuss research seemed to indicate a lot of 1on1 communication that end of driving the individual to commit an act of violence and if you are trying to capture highly tailored direct conversation, taking down speech in the general area for discussing isis and terrorism, throwing out a whole lot of baby with little bathwater. That is a good segue from the Us Government, at least to compel them to provide certain information if they come across it or Government Agencies that use certain information in their response. And collaborative approaches with the summit from Silicon Valley in california, what is your sense of the right way to approach it if the overbroad approach is just that . There have been some proposal in congress to require Internet Companies to report apparent terrorist activity if they identify it and this kind of proposal is pretty concerning. Particular bills that have been proposed there is no real definition of what terrorist activity might be and what that sort of model would set up is a huge incentive for all Communications Providers to air on the side of caution in reporting their users to the government as a suspected terrorist and involved with terrorist activity. The result of that would be a huge amount of overreporting, incredibly concerning in individual civil liberties. And for Law Enforcement. And and and positive viewpoint and positive ideas. And it can happen. And the journalist and the way antiterrorism laws, countries that are allies in the fight against isis, using antiterrorism laws to put journalists in jail. And that kind of overbroad approach that end up constraining the speech, people we need to get different messages out there is a real risk. You can think about the governments amazing ability to be in power. If i call ten social media writers and get them in a room it is a hard pitch. And i look back to my days in government, i was in sacrament of talking to anyone who wanted to do isis videos online. I will talk about how isis is wrong for the following reasons. And holding the phone. And the next and we wont be anywhere near this thing but heres somebody we know you want to talk to. That is how we have tried to use our competing role by bringing together types of Community Leaders you mentioned, society artists, people adept at using social media in the platform, Silicon Valley, after that our job is the same communication to some extent but realizing government is not the best messenger in this space, our job is to step back and allow the creative people, can you get on counter messaging to do their kind of thing. To indicate we are making steady progress in this area and social Media Companies, and not only have we seen enough, twitters announcement has taken down 120,000 isil affiliated accounts. We have seen polling data indicating larger and larger percentages of young arab populations totally ruling out any possibility of joining isil. A survey came out recently saying 80 of 18 to 24yearolds in the arab world in 16 countries that were surveyed said they would never consider joining it and if you were to do a full disapproval rating of isil in many, it is even higher. And one to keep in mind, there is a lot of good work being done. And those that might be susceptible to isil dont fall prey to their message. We are talking a manageable number. The fbi director talks about 900 to 1000 active investigations. From and if the i perspective it looks large but from a messaging perspective, you can view your messaging to those 900,000 people, you can do one on one interventions online. You will never be able to the radicalize or disengage someone online but you might introduce a seed of doubt about killing civilians and then have a real life or offline conversation about how the person should come back. Reaching the target audience is the challenge. The numbers you stated, possibly correct in terms of the number of people in the United States that might be susceptible to isils ideology, you dont want to messaging campaign when you want to target that group that sends a message that all muslim youth are vulnerable or just because muslim youth, some muslim youth might face discrimination, that means they might be susceptible to violent extremism, that is not the case. Muslim youth in the United States overwhelmingly are selling in a number of fields, data indicates per capita at the same level or higher education, per capita higher income levels, people of other faiths, so you dont want to have a 1sizefitsall mass messaging approach, if you look at seamuss report as far as isil related arrests, and recent converts, there is a youth that have grown up alienated, somehow muslim youth are generally susceptible or vulnerable to isils recruitment and 40 of those, they didnt even grow up, muslim communities as muslim young muslims, and Muslim Americans sitting at the dinner table are talking about the same issues as all other americans. Just because muslim is not