Activists seek to stop terrorist propaganda online

Canadian human rights activists want tech companies, governments and NGOs to coordinate efforts to stop terrorist propaganda distributed through social media.  Several videos made and recently distributed by the extremist group ISIS have depicted horrific murders of hostages. They have been successful in drawing world-wide attention, raising money and recruiting people to their cause.

Working to get terrorist videos off the internet is just one way to combat the propaganda effort, says Kyle Matthews, director of the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

‘Create a counter narrative’

“We have to create a counter narrative to put other videos online to counter what ISIS is saying, to basically say that it’s not true—the world is not at war with Islam, you guys do not represent Islam,” says Matthews.

“And we need to start videotaping and doing interviews of fighters that have joined ISIS and managed to escape to tell their stories of what they encountered there, the brutality and the absurdity of the situations.”

The Digital Mass Atrocities Prevention Lab was recently founded by Matthews to study and combat online extremism. “My group is looking at what ISIS is doing well, what they’re doing wrong and trying to do a broad view of what other groups around the world are trying to do to counteract them. The truth is this is very, very new.”

Arguing for a collaborative effort

He has started a crowd funding campaign to raise money to send three people to the Deutsche Welle Global Media Forum in Bonn in June. That is a conference which will examine media challenges in a globalized world. Matthews will host a workshop called “Social media vs. digital jihad” and hopes to discuss what kind of action should be taken.

“There might be a need for a new organization or other organizations, both in academia and civil society as well as governments, collaborating to bring all the resources together to counter this.”