Violent Extremism Is Still Spreading Online. There’s a Way to Stop It.

Buffalo, El Paso, Glendale, Calif., and Colorado Springs. Those are just a few of the cities that have been racked by social media-fueled terrorist attacks since 2019. Statistically, it will only be a matter of months before the U.S. witnesses another terrorist attack committed by a “keyboard warrior.”

It has been four years since a lone gunman live-streamed his murder of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, seeking to inspire others with his video and manifesto, just as he had been inspired by such content. This incident — and particularly social media’s role in fueling real-life harm — drove policymakers and technologists to try to block online terrorist and violent extremist content, or TVEC. Since then, there’s been unprecedented progress and unity among governments and platforms toward quelling the spread of TVEC, from the ambitious multilateral Christchurch Call to Eliminate Terrorist and Violent Extremist Content Online, spearheaded by former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and French President Emmanuel Macron, to the technology industry’s Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism crisis response mechanism. 

Yet the problem persists. In fact, it will become more challenging as media manipulation tools such as deep fakes and sock puppets grow in sophistication. So what are policymakers globally missing in the fight against such abhorrent material? And what are the practices tech companies need to put in place now to more effectively tamp down on its rapid spread? The answers can be found both in technological solutions but also a collective willingness to accept that mistakes will happen in service of swift removal of content that makes the internet deadly. 

Critics who say there isn’t enough happening to take down TVEC usually point fingers at companies’ entrenched interests or policymakers’ limited technological know-how. Beyond these often-discussed issues, we highlight in a recent paper two critical, yet underappreciated barriers to addressing TVEC that deserve greater attention in our quest to make the web safer.