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Featured

Prevention of Radicalization on Social Media and the Internet in this Digital Era

Event Type

Technical Session

Format

Online

Year

2023

Speakers

Hallie Stern, American Democracy & Technology Policy Translation Fellow, McCain Institute

Ardian Shajkovci, Co-Founder and Director of the American Counterterrorism Targeting and Resilience Institute


Moderator

Cecilia Polizzi, Founding President/CEO, Next Wave

02

Description

In recent years, social media and the Internet have expedited the dissemination of information, reduced costs, and provided increasing opportunities for communication, engagement and outreach across national boundaries, cultures, and languages. Terrorist and violent extremist groups have leveraged these new mechanisms and platforms to ensure a continuous flow of supporters into their movements and incite attacks regardless of chains of command, training, instruction, material assistance, or operational planning. The influence of violent extremists ́ propaganda, messaging, and recruiting strategies in the digital realm disproportionately impacts children and young people, who not only comprise a large portion of users but also present heightened vulnerabilities. Due to the vast variety of online platforms, the evolving nature and breadth of exploitative techniques used, the proliferation of online terrorist and violent extremist content remains one of the major policy issues facing counterterrorism authorities and digital communications technology providers. The Next Wave´s technical session sought to expose the complexities of the online ecosystem of terrorism and violent extremism as related to the targeting of children and respond to the following questions: 1. What are the primary ways in which terrorist groups use the Internet to recruit and radicalize children, and what strategies can be employed to prevent such activity? What is the role of governments, tech companies, civil society, and non- professionals? 2. Is child protection truly possible in the digital environment? If yes, through which strategies and in which manner should prevention and mitigation efforts occur?

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