TerrorismSocial media grappling with problems posed by terrorists-supporting contents

Terrorist organizations have adopted social media as a tool for spreading propaganda and recruiting new members. The recent video showing American journalist James Foley beheaded by a member of the Islamic State has reinforced that practice, and now social media Web sites are in the crossfire between granting freedom of expression and facilitating terrorist propaganda. “Why aren’t they taking this more seriously? It’s a national security issue,” said Steven Stalinsky, executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

Evan Kohlmann, chief information officer at Flashpoint Global Partners, a research firm that has worked with Google Inc. on how to root out cyber-jihadism on YouTube, notes that terror groups, including the Islamic State, are using social media to spread misleading images of beautiful landscapes and camaraderie, designed to draw Westerners to join their organizations. “The real dramatic shift is not a technological shift, it’s a shift in content and it’s smart,” Kohlmann said.

After the 9/11 attacks, al-Qaeda launched hundreds of Web sites to promote the group’s ideology, and in turn, governments launched coordinated attacks to shut down those Web sites and secret online forums where terrorists mingled and shared tactics. Today, terror groups have moved their message to social media Web sites, allowing them to interact with an audience and spread their message to a broader base. The four-minute, forty-second video of Foley has been shared and viewed by millions of online viewers, and while counterterrorism officials have reached out to social media networks asking them to censor the video, a quick search on Google will offer multiple sites where the video can be viewed in full. “YouTube has clear policies that prohibit content like gratuitous violence, hate speech and incitement to commit violent acts,” a YouTube spokesperson said. “We also terminate any account registered by a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization and used in an official capacity to further its interests.”

Even when accounts are shut down, terror groups quickly repost their content onto other social media networks, said Stalinsky. The Los Angeles Times reports that Facebook has ordered its teams around the world to remove certain posts relating to Foley’s beheading, but in some cases, such as when a user posts a condemnation of the beheading alongside an edited version of the video that omits the beheading, Facebook has allowed the posts to remain. “Facebook has long been a place where people turn to share their experiences, particularly when they’re connected to controversial events on the ground, such as human rights abuses, acts of terrorism and other violent events,” spokeswoman Debbie Frost said. “Our goal has always been to strike an appropriate balance.”

Marvin Ammori, a First Amendment scholar and a fellow at the New America Foundation, warns that as social media networks become the modern space for public discourse, they must be careful about publishing certain content because they could come under legal scrutiny for materially supporting terrorist organizations. Ammori urges social media networks to find a way to restrict expression. “If the speech there is not what we consider core to democracy, then they have to make a judgment based on the core values of their platform: free expression with some boundaries,” he said. “The problem is the boundary is hard to define.”