ONLINE COMMUNITIES AS A TOOL FOR TERRORIST ACTIVITIES
Going backtrack in time, when a crime occurred, police immediately used to invade the crime scene and start investigations. What happens today is that simultaneously, as a first concern, they also try to keep tracks of the perpetrator’s footprints online. This is applicable not only to cases of more conventional crimes, but also after the occurrence of terrorist attacks episodes.
As you may have noticed from the events of the last 15 years, the internet is playing an increasingly crucial role in terrorism indeed. Videos showing decapitations and killings in undefined and remote places of the world or kidnappings perpetrated by anonymous people with concealed faces, threatening messages and announcements, terrorist groups claiming responsibility for violent attacks throughout the web: this is something almost everyone has had the change to witness to, at least once in a lifetime.
It is in fact true that terrorist groups and cells from all over the world have recently managed to build a widespread online net for recruitment, support, influence, threat and control, whom creators are not even easy to identify and defeat. This is mainly done by means of websites, apps and social media but especially by creating real ad-hoc online communities, working exactly like the ordinary harmless ones.
In order to make things clearer, let’s start outlining what an online community is and then we will try to understand in what way should it favor terrorist and criminal purposes.
Online communities: role and characteristics.
Communities in general develop from the common need of human beings to belong to some sort of social group where they can feel safe and understood. We can find communities either in our physical environment either – as I mentioned - in the online virtual world. In both cases, people coming together in a group are driven by the fact that they share common values, beliefs, passions, interests, concerns, ideologies, and purposes. The striking difference between the two is that in online communities people are supported by the Internet access enabling their virtual communication, with very few, or not at all, face to face interaction.
What all communities have in common is that participants experience a feeling of membership and identification with one another. This is generally due to an interest toward the same mission, like in the above-mentioned case about terrorism.
Communities thrive when members’ level of participation reach its peaks, but this does not imply that more passive members – those who only listen or watch – are not well accepted. As a matter of fact, in the case of online communities, anyone with an internet connection, who is driven by interest, can have a free access with no limits or restrictions.
Online communities are also made up of conversations between members. These take an hybrid shape between talking and writing due to the fact that they generally take place by means of chat rooms.
The community content is elaborated, consumed and promoted by the members (or nodes), who by doing this, also encourage new members to connect. Communities need not to lose members if they want to survive. Online communities are also democratic in terms. This means that opinion leaders or influencers emerge as a point of reference because of their higher level of participation or expertise in the subject that makes them trustful in the eyes of other members, but decisions are made by the majority.
Ideas, opinions and influences run fast inside and outside online communities, and any participant can have a say, can contribute to content and share it. Therefore, everyone has the potential to spread a message to a fairly large group of people, outsiders included. It is particularly from this notion that terrorists start their online activity.
What is Terrorism?
Terrorism is a group phenomenon made up of organizations that are criminal and clandestine in nature. Seemingly, as Crenshaw argued, being part of a terrorist group and having extremist ideologies follows a process of logical reasoning. Whether put in mind by force or coming from a voluntary inner will, being a terrorist is always a choice, nothing pathological or irrational.
Terrorists as a group share common values and ideologies, but especially a common mission: to defeat and put down the ideologies of the different and to force their own as the one and only. With all of this in mind, we can easily understand why online communities go too often together with terrorism.
The role of online communities in terrorist activities.
Criminal organizations of the past were reliant on traditional media when shedding some light on their terrible acts and bringing their causes to the public; but nowadays internet availability provides them with new solutions and a wider range of communication possibilities and tools that are able to reach the public faster and more impressively.In fact, if once it was necessary to wait for the newscast or newspaper for the news to be delivered and terror to be spread, today terrorists create and join their own online communities, try to impose directly their ideology and the cruelties they perpetrate can raise the attention of anyone anytime besides the victims.
The collective nature of terrorist organizations makes the use of online communities very suitable to them. The perpetrators of violent acts can in this way hide behind the web and spread their ideologies by means of these safe cyber places of “true believers” where other nodes share the same interest. They can therefore keep doing their “job” even online. Online communities help propagandize, disseminate information and evidences about to what extent they are intentioned to harm those not following their rules, sustain discourses that seek to dehumanize the enemy and justify the ideology of the movement, but especially to recruit always new members.
Members of an online community of that kind could be: terrorists, potential terrorists and terrorists sympathizers. In the first place, what helps them reach a wider range of spectators is the awareness that besides them there are the so called “lurkers” gravitating around the community. This is the phenomenon regarding the presence of unrevealed users who read what others write without contributing to it, but whose minds can somewhat be influenced anyway. Simply put, this is where members recruitment starts.
How do terrorists acquire new recruits online?
Terrorist groups are always hunting in society for potential new individuals who can still be convinced to join them and act on their behalf. In doing this, the social media have provided them with the widest “market” ever.
What I managed to find out in order to provide you with an example is how ISIS more or less operates in this sense. According to J.M. Berger, scholar and expert in terrorism, basically they divide their recruitment action in the following steps:
Discovery: the moment when a potential recruit is discovered.
Micro Community creation: potential new recruits are surrounded with social input.
Isolation: potential recruits are encouraged to cut ties with mainstream influences such as their families, friends and local religious communities.
Shift to private communication: the newly recruited supporters are invited to take their ISIS related conversations into private or encrypted messaging platforms.
Identification and action encouragement: ISIS members try to find out to what extent the new supporter is willing to act: whether travelling to join physically the group or carrying out terrorist attacks from home. Then they encourage them to take action.
At this link https://videopress.com/v/HzchERm1 you can find a video ISIS released in 2014 that reemerged after thay claimed self-responsibility for the Bataclan attack of an year later. Here they threaten mainly France among Western countries and urge all the extremist muslims living in France and not already joining ISIS to do so. They also invite them in feeling ashamed of not having made “Hijra” (phisical migration to the Islamic State) yet, because “the road is easy so there are not excuse for you”.
But how can we stop online terrorist activity? All we know is that it is extremely important to continue investigating about how and why terrorist movements use the Internet, always keeping in mind that these uses are open to innovation and they change when the modern and dynamic technology changes.
At the following links you can watch some videos providing evidences and support to what I tried to analyze so far:
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/politics/2017/02/06/isis-enabling-online-attacks-tapper-dnt-lead.cnn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSeuZLA1NJ8
Web references:
https://security-informatics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/2190-8532-2-9
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/markaz/2015/11/09/how-terrorists-recruit-online-and-how-to-stop-it/
http://www.asymmetricconflict.org/articles/virtual-communities-as-pathways-to-extremism/
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php/pot/article/view/41/html
Bibliography:
Social Media Marketing, Tuten Tracy L., Solomon Michael R., PEARSON EDUCATION ITALIA, 2014