Since the advent of the Internet, and then web 2.0, various terrorist groups have migrated to the web: they have swapped their VHS tapes and their long propaganda films for video clips of a few minutes, their black and white leaflets for colorful tweets; indeed the change of era and audience has imposed a change of means and strategies. The world was caught off guard by the scale of this unprecedented propaganda, which became more ferocious with the emergence of the terrorist group Daech.
For several years the International Community has been trying to organize itself to overcome this phenomenon which parasites the fastest communication channel that man has ever created: “Internet”. This awareness was strengthened after the latest attacks that took place in Paris, forcing web giants to greater cooperation, authorities to measure the scale of this phenomenon and civil society to become more involved.
Paris had indeed organized a Hackathon in January 2016, an event that went almost unnoticed, and which I consider particularly interesting for having created a research dynamic against the phenomenon of radicalization on the Internet. Among the projects that stood out, I would mention:
SOMs and Navarro Hotline: This project imagined what an emergency call service by SMS could correspond to. In one message, it would be possible to geolocate the person, identify them and determine the type of emergency situation and send the appropriate help.
Lemon Tree, or risk assessment. To relieve call platforms, this project opted for voice recognition technology, the goal being to determine the stress level to prioritize needs.
Etaonis: an automatic processing tool for data flows from social networks, to quickly provide relevant and geolocated information and thus allow law enforcement to have a better vision of a situation.
Dispatch Victim is a mobile application allowing to make the transport of the injured to different hospitals more fluid depending on the urgency of the situation and the occupancy rate of hospital establishments.
Nec Mergicure (Net Merge Cure) would respond to the challenge of preventing radicalization and the design and dissemination of counter-discourse. The solution would make it possible to search for subscribers to Daech Twitter accounts in order to deliver an adequate discourse to them (educational, detox, humor, hijacking).
Chasseurs de rumeurs would be based on social networks to allow the detection of crises and clusters of users to prevent the spread of rumors.
Apart from these applications which could soon be found on our smartphones, other digital means are being put in place at European and global scales.
Unesco is jumping on the bandwagon.
In its effort to allow young people to learn more about different cultures and thus become responsible world citizens, the UNESCO Regional Office in Dakar signed a memorandum of understanding with the Touchable Earth Foundation in September 2015. This collaboration aims to promote global citizenship education and prevent youth against radicalization.
Touchable Earth is a mobile application that improves intercultural communication between children and young people of the World. Mali was chosen for the launch of this campaign.
When GAFA become the giants of radicalization prevention:
Google is strengthening its online system against radicalization. The search engine has started offering advertising space to associations fighting against indoctrination, in order to promote a counter-discourse, and this in response to criticisms made to it in the past, notably since the series of attacks in France.
According to Google’s head of public policy in Europe Anthony House, the messages appear at the top of the search page, like advertisements, when searching for terms and expressions identified as sensitive. For example, “joining Daech”. On the other hand, there is no change in the order of the results.
This pilot program is part of Google AdWords Grands, the service that grants money to charitable organizations, in order to promote their mission and help them recruit volunteers. In the case of the fight against online radicalization, Google offers nearly $10,000 per month in free advertising to NGOs, to allow them to broadcast their messages. The project is still in its infancy.
YouTube is also concerned
Google has faced, along with other major Internet platforms, incessant criticism about its supposed role in online radicalization.
Google admits failing to filter flows, especially on YouTube, where nearly 300 hours of video are uploaded every minute. According to Anthony House more than 14 million videos were removed from its service for being in contradiction with its terms of use and some for apology for terrorism. Users also participate in the removal of videos with “inappropriate content”. To block the various criticisms, Google is reportedly creating anti-radicalization videos that would be uploaded to YouTube.
The fight against propaganda also concerns other Web actors, including Twitter and Facebook. Twitter reportedly has a team of 100 people, whose goal is to remove violent, extremist and inappropriate content from the platform. This year Twitter announced the closure of more than 125,000 accounts linked to terrorist activities.
Meanwhile WhatsApp goes it alone.
The messaging service WhatsApp has decided to encrypt “end-to-end” communications on its platform: a measure aimed at further protecting its users’ data.
More concretely, as explained by the service on its official blog: “when you send a message, the only person who can read it is the person or the group to whom you send this message. No one (else) can get into this message. Not cybercriminals. Not hackers. Not oppressive regimes.”
Soon Big Brother will be put to contribution
The recent terrorist attacks in the Brussels metro have revived the idea of intelligent software to detect suspicious behavior. DéGIV (Detection and Management of Incidents in a railway Vehicle)
Indeed, researchers are working on the development of intelligent software. In June 2015, a device was tested on line 14 of the Paris metro. An audio and video box called DéGIV was used. This box analyzes unusual behavior in real time but for the moment, these are rather acts of vandalism and aggression rather than terrorist acts. Difficult for researchers to work on this subject: suspicious behavior in a crowd remains complicated to determine.
Industry has been thinking about this for 20 years but the current context of the anti-terrorism fight should accelerate the development of these tools. Intelligent camera devices could be put on the market within one to two years, specialists estimate.
In short, research in artificial intelligence projects is only beginning and already poses ethical, philosophical and deontological questions concerning the respect for the private life of citizens: a matter of slider and efficiency, because indeed two questions currently arise: To what point will these projects be effective in preventing and stopping attacks from occurring? And how far are citizens ready to sacrifice their freedom for “a bit” of security?
Kamel SOUIG
Doctoral Researcher in Information and Communication Sciences, Université Aix Marseille.
Journalist, reporter (2006-2012), Communication Manager at Founder Family.
