Counter-messaging

Earlier this month, the Brookings Institution held a panel discussion where Ross Frenett (Co-Founder and Director of Moonshot CVE, a tech start-up that 'counters violent extremism through data driven innovation'), Yasmin Green (Head of Research and Development at Jigsaw, formerly Google Ideas) and Richard Stengel (Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs U.S. Department of State) talked at length about counter-messaging projects being run by Jigsaw and Moonshot. Counter-messaging, Yasmin Green explained, has three phases; first, research is used to learn what sort of content those viewing ISIS recruitment videos are attracted to, secondly, advertising is used to try and engage these people and, finally, by clicking on the adverts the target is directed to videos on the Jigsaw youtube channel. The discussion inadvertently explores issues around freedom in the online space, explains what is being done by governments and companies to counter so-called extremism and proposes how the technology being developed now might be applied in the future.

Half an hour into the discussion, we move from the banning of terrorist adverts by Google to the preference for a start-up business model by Moonshot CVE. Ross Frenett accepts that there is a legitimate criticism that a start-up might 'follow the funding' rather than seeking genuine innovation (see my last post on this) and suggests that they have allayed this concern by not relying on a single revenue stream. He then lays out the advantages of the start-up over a charity model for this kind of work, not relying on government funding allowing them to 'swiftly iterate and take risks'. Going on to describe how this has allowed them to not only 'hack the online' but also the 'physical space' when they recently used drones to deliver counter-messaging in Syria. Returning to the online, he describes the use of artificial intelligence to identify individuals and to engage them in one on one conversations. Yasmine Green elaborates on this, suggesting that 'targeted advertising can match demand for terrorist material with voices that can refute messaging'.

It's notable during the discussion that while Moonshot's full name is Moonshot Countering-Violent Extremism, the reference to people targeted by direct messaging tends to use vague terms such as 'individuals'. The Joint Committee on Human Rights' (JCHR) recent report on Counter-Extremism suggests a reason for this lack of qualification, the JCHR takes issue with the UK Government's failure to define 'extremism' and explains that attempts to progress with proposed legislation in this area would be 'futile' without such a definition. Moonshot and Jigsaw's counter-messaging project will remain unhindered by such judgement or the need for definitions as they have insulated themselves from governmental oversight, they will continue to 'swiftly iterate and take risks' to challenge and change the views of the undefined extremist as they move into the next stage of their counter-messaging project which according to Yasmine Green was not planned, '[we] had not anticipated building what we would end up building which is a machinery that acts independently at scale in other languages...maybe even the successor to this terrorist group when it manifests itself'. 'The successor terrorist group' presumes that we live in a world where the threat of terror is continuous and it's easy to see how this perspective will persist when you have organisations like Jigsaw and Moonshot able to maintain their business of identifying and challenging the threat with a funding model that is entirely lacking in oversight. We've become accustomed to living in a world where signs and pop-ups are individually tailored to define how we should look, feel and spend our money, perhaps a world where this logic extends into our Politics is just the new normal.

Quasi-markets to Suppress Dissent

Department of Homeland Security 6th July 2016

Arun Kundnani described in his book, The Muslims Are Coming, how the logic of counterterrorism had been developed in collaboration between the UK and the US after 9/11. As I have talked about in previous blogs, this led to the development of the narratives of extremism and radicalisation that have resulted in the suppression of voices in opposition to the state. This shared logic appears to persist since both the Department of Homeland Security in the US and the Home Office recently announced that they were offering grants of $10Million to 'counter violent extremism' and £1.5Million to 'prevent vulnerable people from becoming radicalised'.

Home Office 31st August 2016

Over the last few years, I have had contact with the Prevent Counterterrorism Strategy as a teacher who was expected to report my students to the security services, as an academic carrying out socio-linguistic research into Prevent, as a contributor to numerous reports for NGOs and media outlets as well as for a local government scrutiny committee into Prevent. This represents a lot of time talking about counterterrorism and the most hard to detect aspect of all of these conversations has had the most profound effect on all participants; by engaging in a conversation that refers to 'radicalisation' or 'extremism' we find ourselves caught in a circular logic that justifies the need for a policy to prevent opposition to the state. To avoid this, one has to constantly and consciously take a step back to remind oneself that views that radically diverge from our own or which might be perceived as extreme do not necessarily pose a violent threat and therefore do not require suppression; for democracy to function they must be allowed.

When someone engages in the competition to win the grant money being offered, they have to engage in the circular logic that radical and extreme views lead to violence (I explored how the justification of this view was only supported by the terms' association with violence in the definitions that counterterrorism policies provide in my last post). To think about applying for these grants reinforces the logic that political views should be suppressed and provides a financial incentive to buy into this idea, making it yet harder to extricate oneself from the repressive logic. I suspect that we'll never know if the decision to launch these grants was devised in a transatlantic meeting straight out of In The Loop or if the timing is coincidental but we can be sure that, rather than promoting innovation, they reinforce a circular logic that is undermining our right to hold and express views in opposition to the state.

I'm generally the last person to argue for market solutions but the quasi-market of these innovation funds is unlikely to offer any kind of real innovation to society.