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.