9 30 a. M. Eastern here on cspan2. Next, a look at how isis recruits supporters on the internet and how the u. S. Government combats them online. This is about an hour. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon, everyone. Were going to get started. So welcome to this panel, disrupting isis online the challenges of combating online radicalization. This panel is put on by the Advisory Committee to the congressional internet caucus, and were hosted by the congressional internet caucus, and wed like to thank the cochairs, congressman goodlatte and congresswoman eshoo and senator john thune and Patrick Leahy for hosting us here today. The caucus hosts events every few weeks on salient topics to the internet and policy, and and we invite you to come out for events throughout the summer. So today we have several excellent panelists with us today. We have emma llanso from the center for democracy and technology who works on the Free Expression project. We have Rashad Hussain from the department of justice, counterrerring violent extremely over there, and we also have seamus hughes, Deputy Director for the program on extremism at George Washington universitys center for cyber and homeland security. And my name is miranda bogen, and im a fellow at the internet law and policy foundry and a fellow at the congressional Internet Congress in the past. So lets get started. Ill just give a brief overview of the issue going on, and then well jump right into it and get into whats the real issue here with extremists online, what role do the platforms like twitter, facebook, google play in this, and how what is the right way to be approaching the issue of dealing with extremist content online and recruitment for terrorist groups abroad. So as you may have seen going on, we have the social media platforms like twitter and facebook have generally, especially in their early years, been quite in favor of leaving their platforms as places for Free Expression. Theyve been adamant supporters of that, but gradually, especially over the past few year, weve seen that being taken advantage of by groups like alshabaab in somalia, like alqaeda and then we have the Islamic State beginning to use the platforms even more active lu than that actively than that, bringing it to a totally different level. And now the platforms are facing pressure on multiple sides from the government here, from governments abroad, from their users to do something more to take the content out of peoples social feeds, you know . Its not manager you want to see something you want to see every day, but this content is not something that we want spreading around because it isly effective in recruiting people to go abroad and join these causes. So why dont we turn to seamus whos really been working on this issue and tracking this phenomenon over time. Can you tell us when did this start . How are the platforms being use . What are the groups doing . Yeah. I think it started when the internet started, right . In the early ages when we looked at terrorist groups online, it was on the passwordprotected forums, and as it shifted to twitter and facebook, so did recruitment. So if you look at the number of individuals that have been arrested for isisrelated charms in the u. S. , its 85 since march 2014. The average age is 26. So isis recruiters and spotters are going online to where their demographic is, so that tends to be twitter. Weve seen a shift actually moving back over to teleframe and other platforms, but they clearly use the online environment in a way that is conducive for them to recruit. Think of it in three ways. So they use it as grooming, so over the summer the program on extremism at George Washington, we did a six month study of isis recruits online mostly focusing on american but also english language speakers. So we look at about a thousand accounts on a daily basis. Of those you see them grooming online. So we watched a young woman from the midwest who had questions about her faith and ap isis recruiter realized she was naive and was answering the questions in an innocuous way. And a few weeks later he would slowly introduce the isis ideology into the conversation. The other way is logistical support. An individual like mohamed khan, a 19yearold kid from chicago, when he gets picked up at ohare airport, him and his underaged siblings, a 17yearold and 16yearold, are planning to go join isis. When they arrested him, they went through his stuff and realized he had four numbers. He received those numbers of people to call when he reached turkey. It lowers the bar for an individual to meet a radicalized recruiter online. And the last is what the fbi says, the devil on the shoulder, so egging people on to do this. You also have to realize that the numbers pale in comparison to any other form of conversation online, you know . Youre talking about 34,000 twitter 44,000 twitter accounts for isis sporters. The supporters. Theyre clearly using the online environment. And the last thing id like to say its not like if twitter went away tomorrow, we wouldnt have recruits that were joining, right in the fact that theres a physical space, that theres a socalled caliphate, that is a driver. Twitter, telegram, places like that tend to help facilitate that recruitment, but theyre not the reason why people decide to become radicalized and join groups like this, it allows in the u. S. For when you see at least the people that have been arrested communities dont radicalize in america. Individuals do. We dont have these pockets of radicalization like you would have in some european countries. Here if youre trying to find a likeminded individual, you usually try to find that online. Ill leave it there. Rashad, maybe you can tell us about how the department of justice and the government is approaching this phenomenon and how youre working to combat. Well, its a threat that we take very seriously. Our first priority, of course, at the Justice Department is to protect the American People from attacks. And what were seeing isil do online is use some very sophisticated techniques. Seamus talked about some of the approaches that theyve used. Theyve also done Something Different than previous groups in that they have adopted crowd sourcing model through which they encourage anyone anywhere to go out and commit attacks against innocent people. So part of the challenge we face with government is we have to be successful 100 of the time. Isils overwhelmingly rejected. Theyre recruiting millions of people around the world. They reach out to an audience of 1. 6 billion muslims and others, and even if they are successful in the minuscule number of those cases, then you still have a problem of 20,000, 30,000 foreign fighters. You still have the problem of isis getting followers all around the world. And theyre very adept at using different techniques, targeting different audiences in multiple languages. What they try to do is reach out to disaffected youth and offer a sense of purpose, a sense of belonging. They use a combination of strength and warmth that they try to lure recruits with, a sense of camaraderie. And as twisted as it sounds, they claim to be building something. So weve all seen the atrocities that theyve broadcast around the world, but theyve also put out positive messaging. Ive mentioned the themes of camaraderie and strength and warmth, and they claim to be building something, and theyre calling people to build something which is in their conception the caliphate. And is so one of realizations that we have as government is that there are multiple audiences, and we have to be smart about using the right messengers to reach the right audiences. So government isnt always going to be the right messenger to reach the various audiences were trying to reach. Potentially thinking about joining isil in the short term, then you have the immediate influencers around them, family, friends, peers, then you have a set of cultural influencers that canning influence generally and you have kind of a mass audience. So government may be more effective in the prevention space in reaching out to people that havent already bought into aspects of the propaganda or the ideology, but you really need specific audiences to reach, for example, the specific class of fence sitters. Who are fence sitters going to listen to . Its a question we think about. Perhaps theyll only listen to other extremists, and maybe those are extremests that are not violent, but people that are extreme in their views that can persuade them to come back. Thats not a role for the government to play. Who is the best audience to reach out to cultural influencers . So what weve tried to do in government is where possible message ourself to the audiences which we think we can reach. And some of the common themes that weve, that weve used are to highlight isils atrocities against particularly miss muslim communities where theyre also killing in big numbers, amplifying the people who have defected from isil, highlighting losses as seamus noted they actually have territory which they can point to and say come and help us establish the [inaudible] so we point to the losses that theyre taking particularly in iraq and syria. And weve also tried to expose the living conditions, and defectors have done some of that under isil territories. And perhaps most importantly, we i we think its important to work not just with government, but with partners to disseminate positive messages that make clear what the rest of us stand for, what the rest of the Muslim Community stand for and to highlight positive alternatives. So if someone says i really have a problem with whats happening in syria under the bashar regime and i want to do something about it, weve got to find other paths for people to take that are constructive rather than destruct i have. Destructive. So it sounds like we have the dual use of the internet both as a platform for recruitment, but also as for engagement on the other side. And we also see that the platforms are torn between taking down sunt content and threatening content. And and on one hand leaving it up for intelligence purposes and on the other hand really trying to minimize what theyre taking down because so that they dont have to be the ones judging what is appropriate content and what is not. Maybe, emma, can you tell us about the response that weve seen from the companies and some of the concerns they might be considering when theyre asked to comment on how to approach this issue . Sure, yes. So, obviously, over the past year and a half can you hear me now . Ah, great. Clearly, over the past year and a half weve seen a huge amount of scrutiny on major Internet Companies, you know, the big social media platforms about how are they responding to the existence of is socalled extremist content online. And it might help to describe just a little bit sort of the Legal Framework around, around speech online, you know . What is it that enables the kind of exchange of information and expression of opinions that we all enjoy. In the u. S. Weve got both the strong protections of the First Amendment for speech where we have, you know, very high standards for what is speech that the government can actually say is unlawful, kind of relevant issues in that context are, you know, is a comment a direct incitement to imminent lawless action or imminent violence, it a true threat to violence or intended violence against another individual. But we dont generally have broad prohibitions against hate speech, and theres no theres certainly no kind of definition of extremist content as, you know, a set of unlawful speech. So already were sort of in an environment where what exactly are we talking about, what sort of speech and content are we talking about is unclear. What weve seen a lot of the companies do is in trying to apply their terms of service which are kind of variable across platforms as ways to remove content that gets reported to them. So so Internet Companies, you know, hosts of our speech online are generally protected from any legal liability for speech that they are not themselves the author of. This is section 230 of the Communications Act that unsures that if i insures that if i, for example, tweet something defamatory about seamus, seamus can sue me, of course, because im the one who said the comment, but he cant sue twitter about it. And this law has been incredibly important to, you know, the amazing innovation weve seen with the internet and Online Platforms and also to supporting speech online. All of us depend on a number of different intermediaries being willing to host and transmit our speech if, you know, if youre an isp or youre a social Media Provider who could face legal liability for your speech, theyd be very unlikely to let you, to speak. So, but also in that Law Companies are protected from liability for their decisions to remove speech. This is where we see Companies Developing terms of service where they set out the standards for what kind of speech theyll accept on their platforms and what theyll say is kind of a violation of their rules or standards. And so a lot of the platforms have rules about hate speech even though this is very often speech thats totally protected under the law in the u. S. , they may still say they dont want to host speech that is denigrating of a particular group or class. Most of them have standards against direct threats or threats of violence. Of i believe facebook has a standard against dangerous organizations in particular by which they tend to mean terrorist organizations or organized crime. So weve seen kind of a range of different kinds of terms grow up on the different platforms over the years, and then companies then in response to kind of user flags about speech that appears to violet their terms will violate their terms take a look at content and say does this seem to go too far, does this step over the line of what theyve already described to be acceptable or not acceptable on their platforms. So i meant to ask the panel about this balance of sort of the opportunity of the internet as a platform to spread various different types of speech, positive speech, to keep track of whats going on and sort of the desire to control this, the dangerous speech, the hate speech. What have you, in the Research Arena how do you see that playing out . Sure. So im kind of dualhatted on this one. We have a fellow at the program on extremism, jan berger, who looked at english language accounts over a month period to figure out if takedown was effective or not, and heres the takeaway with a caveat. They were effective in terms of reducing the number of followers that the person had when they came back, particularly on twitter theres the first part. Heres the second part that we should also keep in mind. Theres a builtin system for resiliency into the m. So an individual like Terence Mcneal whos arrested for terrorismrelated charges last fall, when he started watching him, he was lone wolf 7. By the time he was arrested, he was lone wolf 21. Every time he came back as 8,9, 10, the eye us theres an isis echo chamber that has essentially shot out accounts. They build in resiliency. They say here is lone wolf 8, he used to be lone wolf 7, everyone follow him. We know were going to get kicked off for violating terms of service, butre going to help other people get back on. From a research perspective, you clearly want more data as much as you possibly can. Its clearly a balancing act on whether takedown is the necessary way. I tend to think that, i tend to be more on the positive encounter and alternative messaging than i am on takedown, although there are some instances where i think take downs warranted. Yeah. Weve been encouraged by companies enforcing their terms of service. And theres echo chambers out there in the violent extremism world where theyre posting violent tweets and beheading videos. Its not a l of intelligence value necessarily in that echo chamber. Now, where there may be some limited cases in which it can be helpful and there is some intelligence side, and that can always be communicated to companies. But for the most part, you know, i agree with seamus view on it. Now, its important again to remember that overwhelmingly isil is rejected around the world. And theres a reason for that. Its because of, largely because of their own actions. And a lot of the atrocities that theyre committing, the stories that have been told by people that have been impacted, by isil and other groups, the stories of defectors, all of those are getting out through social media as well. And so its i know we have, you know, perhaps a thousandth of a percent of people who are targeted by isil have gone and joined, and thats unacceptably high for all of us because were trying to prevent any single attack from ever happening. But its important to remember that these platforms also provide an opportunity to put op not just counter on not just countermessaging, but positive messaging that allow the rest of us, including muslim communities, to communicate what we stand for. And thats really, i mean, the risk of the overbroad content policy or particularly like increasing pressure on companies to strengthen their policies, make them so that more content can come down, is that it is this, you know, potentially vastly overbroad response to what ends up being, you know, as seamus research seems to indicate, you know, its a lot of Oneonone Communications that end up driving the actual, you know, individual to commit an act of violence. And if youre trying to capture oneonone, highlytailored, direct conversations with a policy thats about taking down all of the speech thats sort of in the general area of discussing isis and terrorism and u. S. Foreign policy, youre throwing out a whole lot of baby with very little bath water. [laughter] is thats a good segway, because we have had some pressure from the u. S. Government to add additional liabilities for the platforms or at least to compel them to turn over certain information if they come across it or more Government Agencies to use certain information in their response. And weve also had more collaborative approaches with the summits between the administration and Silicon Va