On January 27, the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade held a hearing on “The Evolution of Terrorist Propaganda: The Paris Attack and Social Media.” The purpose was to explore the question of whether U.S. companies like Twitter, YouTube, and Facbook are doing enough to stop or limit social media use by terrorists.
Subcommittee Chair Ted Poe (TX-R) said that groups like ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) “have hosted press conferences, raised money on Twitter, and other social media,” likening such practices to “letting our enemies take out an ad in the New York Times during World War II.”
“There needs to be an effort to work cooperatively with these private American companies to try to develop an industry standard on how you deal with these things,” said Representative Joaquin Castro (TX-D). “Drawing a line can be very tough … but we should look for best practices.”
Mark Wallace, CEO of the Counter Extremism Project, cited a Wilson Center study finding that 90 percent of terrorist groups’ online activities occur on social network sites.
The problem, said Evan Kohlmann, a counterterrorism expert and chief innovation officer of Flashpoint Partners, “is that companies lack the incentive to remove terrorist propaganda and are leery of government surveillance.”
Representative Bill Keating (MA-D) said, “There is no doubt that social networking, the Internet, and propaganda have become the premier recruitment and radicalization tools for terrorist gangs,” but noted that the cyberspace is also where democratic societies exercise their freedoms.
Rebecca MacKinnon, cofounder of Global Voices Online, framed the challenge as “how to fight terrorism and violent extremism in the Internet age while not undermining the core principles and freedoms of democratic and open societies.”
Representative Poe and several of his House colleagues recently sent a letter to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo urging him to increase efforts to prevent terrorist organizations from using American social media for fundraising, propaganda, and recruitment purposes.
