Does the internet really radicalise terrorists?

The shooting in Strasbourg, in which at least three people have been killed, will once again raise questions as to how people are radicalised. France remains on its highest level of alert with the gunman still on the run.

The 29-year-old, who has yet to be named by authorities, has reportedly served prison sentences in France and Germany for non-terrorist related crimes for years. The early indications are that the man was not radicalised online, with officials saying his radicalisation occurred in prison. And yet, in the aftermath of terrorist incidents, blame is so often placed on the internet – even when no evidence exists to suggest it played a role.

Four days after terrorist Khalid Masood drove his Hyundai Tucson through 49 people on Westminster Bridge, killing four pedestrians, then fatally stabbed PC Keith Palmer on the grounds of the Houses of Parliament, Amber Rudd, then the home secretary, sat down on the sofa at the BBC’s The Andrew Marr Show.

Rudd had WhatsApp – which Masood had used to distribute a document supporting jihad to his friends – in her sights.

“There should be no place for terrorists to hide,” she said. “We need to make sure that organisations like WhatsApp, and there are plenty of others like that, don't provide a secret place for terrorists to communicate with each other.” She said "real people" don't need the end-to-end encryption the Facebook-owned messaging app provides.

Since then, technology companies have been in the firing line of politicians keen to get a grasp on terrorism’s spread. Rudd’s successor, Sajid Javid, has been equally firm on the industry’s need to change: he was a signatory of a communique published in August 2018 by the Five Eyes security partners of the UK, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

“The inability of intelligence and law enforcement agencies to lawfully access encrypted data and communications poses challenges to law enforcement agencies’ efforts to protect our communities”, the document stated. It continued to say that social networks should establish “lawful access solutions” so governments could access that data.

But are social networks the best target for police and politicians to crack down on?

Social networks are a vital lifeline for terrorist organisations, says Rita Katz, director of SITE Group, an independent company that monitors the way jihadists communicate. “Terrorist groups function by the same motives as any major movement, in that they hold global networks, and reach out to as wide an audience as possible – which is why social media is such a vital tool for them to exploit,” she says.

The enormous reach of the main social networks provides terror groups with a massive public forum in which to potentially spread their message. But the monitoring of materials that violate each site’s terms of service means that such content rarely stays online for long.

To make that harder, Isis and other terror groups deploy sprawling armies of bots ready to disseminate their message at the push of a button. The groups know well that these burner accounts will soon be reported and taken down (1.2 million accounts were between August 2015 and August 2017, according to Twitter’s transparency report – “that’s about one a minute,” explains Stuart Macdonald, director of a multidisciplinary cyberterrorism project at Swansea University). Still, extremist groups hope that by going for quantity, rather than quality, they can get their message out regardless.

“When they’ve got a new piece of propaganda coming out they’ll just spam it over and over again,” says Joe Whittaker, a research fellow at the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, who is doing his PhD on terrorists’ use of the internet and social media at Swansea University and Leiden University. "Those accounts don’t remain on Twitter for long, but they’re not willing to give up the really far-reaching effects of the popular social media platforms.”

It’s also not the bigger social networks that struggle the most with such content. Jihadists had what Macdonald calls their “golden age” on Twitter in 2013 and 2014. The site’s algorithms were too good, recommending likeminded people with whom they should connect, and the platform’s free speech approach meant that users were given relatively free rein. Since then, Twitter has started suspending accounts more readily, while Facebook cracks down intermittently on extreme content. YouTube – which Katz once lambasted for being an easy home for terrorists – has made amends. Now the site has introduced measures that keep terrorists from easily pushing their message to a broad, mainstream audience – but that has unintended consequences.

“There’s a displacement factor,” says Macdonald. “The community building aspects still live on, but on other platforms where they won’t be suspended as quickly.” It’s for that reason that Telegram has become a favoured place for plotting; previously violent extremist groups have used other services such as Kik, but terrorists trawl court documents for any indication that a service has been compromised or collaborates with law enforcement. According to Whittaker, a reference in an indictment that the FBI had won Kik onside meant it was deserted by extremists.

They also sometimes only use the mainstream platforms to broadcast their messages, hosting it elsewhere. “Jihadists need to host their material somewhere, and in order to host it, they exploit virtually any relevant service at hand,” says Katz.

Which is where things get hard for Mariusz Żurawek, a 30-year-old who runs JustPaste.it from his bedroom in Poland. JustPaste.it is a content sharing website which was latched on to by Isis to host images of executions several years ago (and which still remains the second-most popular online hosting platform used by Isis, Al Qaeda and their supporters, according to data from SITE Group, more popular than YouTube, Dropbox, Vimeo and Imgur combined).

“This guy started receiving takedown requests from law enforcement all over the world,” says Macdonald. “He got swamped. He needed translation and legal advice.” Żurawek and JustPaste.it are now part of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT), a cross-company consortium founded in June 2017.

One site that isn’t a member of the GIFCT consortium is what SITE says is the number one most-used site by terrorists: PasteThis.at. The site’s Whois information indicates it’s registered to someone named “James Myers” who lives on a non-existent street in Skelberry, on Shetland.

The Counter Extremism Project believes the data is “falsified”, and alleges that “there is... strong circumstantial evidence suggesting that PasteThis.at was created specifically for use by Isis and their fans”. (At the time of publication the website for PasteThis.at is not live).

But dissemination of propaganda isn’t the only way terrorist groups tend to use social networks. They’re also using encrypted chat apps such as Telegram to plan attacks – though the scale of this depends on where you are in the world. Within hours of the Strasbourg Christmas market attack last night, ISIS were claiming credit via specialist channels on Telegram, according to Katz.

Recent research has looked at the origin of more than 100 foreign fighters in the Middle East who took up arms for the so-called Islamic State from Germany, and how they were folded into the group. “If the internet was so important, it would follow they’d come from everywhere,” says Whittaker.

But they didn’t. In large part, the fighters came from a handful of communities with known radical preachers indoctrinating them in mosques and on street corners – the German equivalent of Molenbeek, the notorious district of Brussels where police have checked in on one in four residents for suspected links to terror. The man who carried out the Strasbourg attack on December 11 is another example of someone whose ties seem to have been fostered offline, according to French TV station BFM.

It’s the same in Asia, where Julie Chernov Hwang researches people’s paths into and out of terrorism. “The salience of the internet is going to vary by place,” she says. “I would hypothesise that far more actual recruitment is happening through face-to-face meetings than online meetings. If you’re going to join clandestine networks, the organisers want to know who you are.”

This is in contrast to the United States – a country Whittaker looks at in-depth – where indoctrination and what’s commonly referred to as “radicalisation” occurs online. “In Europe, for the most part, offline social networks are important,” he says. “That doesn’t mean they aren’t using WhatsApp or Telegram to talk to each other, but it’s not necessarily linking people that wouldn’t have spoken before.”

While social media companies are often cast as the bogeyman, including by parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee in a report published in late November, those who look into this area on a day-to-day basis say they’re actually doing a decent job.

The Intelligence and Security Committee praises the UK’s Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU), a national organisation which searches the internet for radicalising or extremist content and reports it to social networks. In the nine years the group has been running, it has successfully secured 300,000 takedowns.

However, an freedom of information request to the CTIRU in December 2016, after a public pronouncement that the unit had taken down 250,000 pieces of terrorist content from the internet with the help of over 300 companies, showed that the removal rate isn’t 100 per cent successful. Between March 2016 and March 2017, the CTIRU asked for the removal of 8,931 links to what it said was terrorist content, but companies declined to comply.

And even that doesn’t recognise the amount of automation involved in taking down terrorist material. Those 300,000 posts taken down in nine years were just the remnants of an AI-driven hunt for extremist content.

“The emphasis on referrals from CTIRU seems a bit out of touch with how much work has been done on the AI front,” says Macdonald. However, AI-enabled automation is expensive, and the wealthier, larger companies are the ones who can afford it. SITE’s Katz wants to see a global database of terrorist images, akin to those developed in the battle against the sharing of images of child abuse, against which any new content can be cross-checked by all social networks and internet firms. “If an image appeared once, it wouldn’t appear again,” she says. “This was a huge success and you find far fewer complaints about images of child abuse.”

Just as the internet has improved the ability for all of us to converse across the world cheaper than ever before, so it has for terrorists.

It’s a difficult battle to fight. “Just as there will always be efforts to prevent crime and people will always find ways to commit crime, you can keep trying to make online spaces more secure, but terrorists will keep trying to find ways to get their content onto these platforms,” says Macdonald. “The fact they’ll keep trying doesn’t mean you should stop trying.”

But tackling terrorists on a digital battlefield is just one part of the problem. “[The internet has] created new challenges, but fundamentally there’s no reason to think the process people go through to become terrorists has really changed,” says Whittaker. Even when they use social networks and chat apps to communicate, the prevalence of end-to-end encryption means that there’s a higher degree of operational safety for terrorists that can only be cracked through gumshoe detective work.

“It’s very difficult for law enforcement to electronically get in. The challenge is: how do you use old-fashioned means like undercover officers to get in?,” asks Whitaker.

There’s also a blame game going on that pits private companies and governments against each other exactly at the point that they need to collaborate the most. “You could argue that for a lot of the rhetoric coming out of the prime minister’s office and the Home Office, it’s very useful if there’s somebody at fault,” he adds.

“After the Westminster Bridge attack, and after the Manchester bombing, Amber Rudd was on Andrew Marr that weekend saying we need to cut out end-to-end encryption. That’s patently absurd to start off with, but at the same time it creates someone who is responsible for it. It’s not a government’s inability to protect its citizens, it’s social media who are facilitating it in some way.”

And that narrative has dominated political discourse. It even featured in the Intelligence and Security Committee’s report, which said that “[social media] companies take a commercial view – if something harms their reputation and impacts on their bottom line then that is what will prompt them to change their behaviour”. But it’s overly reductive.

“The internet is merely a mode of communication,” explains Whittaker. “Yet the way it’s spoken about, the internet is given this radicalising agency. It doesn’t make sense.”

Masood, is believed to have been a consumer of terrorist material online, and viewed beheadings and executions on YouTube, according to the ISC’s recent report. But it was in prison in 2000 and 2001 that the man who had up until then been known as Adrian Russell Elms converted to Islam. He became radicalised soon after.

And, tellingly, the official independent report into the attack written by David Anderson, QC found that “his relatively small digital collection did not contain much of the standard jihadi content that is normally found in investigations involving Islamist-inspired terrorists”.