https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2956-0883
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Abstract
In recent years, extremists have increasingly turned to online spaces to distribute propaganda and as a recruitment tool. While there is a clear need for governments and social media companies to respond to these efforts, such responses also bring with them a set of ethical challenges. This paper provides an ethical analysis of key policy responses to online extremist propaganda. It identifies the ethical challenges faced by policy responses and details the ethical foundations on which such policies can potentially be justified in a modern liberal democracy. We also offer an ethical framework in which policy responses to online extremism in liberal democracies can be grounded, setting clear parameters upon which future policies can be built in a fast-changing online environment.
Acknowledgements
The authors are grateful to Kateira Aryaeinejad and CJ O’Connor for reviewing and editing this paper, and for their many insightful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Financial Times, “Zawahiri Leads Al-Qaeda into Battle for Muslim Hearts and Minds,” https://www.ft.com/content/e8bff11a-4d5e-11da-ba44-0000779e2340 (accessed November 4, 2005).
2 Much of the literature looks at the threats and challenges posed by IS and other jihadi extremists. However, given the connections between online materials and the rise of right wing and nationalist violence in recent years, we focus this paper on the broader threat of violent extremism generally, rather than just Jihadi violent extremism.
3 For more on this see Frederick F. Schauer, Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Stanley Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech: and it’s a Good Thing, Too (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1994); Wojciech Sadurski, Freedom of Speech and its Limits (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999); David van Mill, “Freedom of Speech (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Summer 2017 Edition),” https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/freedom-speech/ (accessed May 1, 2017).
4 We use extremism here in a broad sense and note that there are important distinctions between extremism and violent extremism which we do not address in this paper, and that how these terms are defined are part of an ongoing debate. We expand on these issues later in the paper where we discuss what is extremist content and who should make these decisions.
5 We note here that a number of the principles we discuss are covered by particular laws. While the relation between law and ethics, particularly in complex areas like counter-terrorism, is worthy of analysis, we do not have space to enter into those discussions here. Our approach complements jurisprudence, offering guidance for policy makers and in the application of the relevant laws.
6 We note that there is an apparent lack of evidence of the actual impact of extremist propaganda and the overemphasis of the importance of online propaganda and influence. See Kate Ferguson, “Countering Violent Extremism through Media and Communication Strategies: A Review of the Evidence” (Partnership for Conflict, Crime and Security Research, Cambridge, 2016); Alastair Reed, “An Inconvenient Truth: Countering Terrorist Narratives - Fighting a Threat We Do Not Understand - ICCT,” https://icct.nl/publication/an-inconvenient-truth-countering-terrorist-narratives-fighting-a-threat-we-do-not-understand/ (accessed July 2, 2018).
7 Ian Brown and Josh Cowls, “Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material” (VOX-Pol, 2015).
8 While we are focussing our attention to liberal democracies in this paper, following the work of someone like Jonathan Haidt we consider that many of the values we discuss are in fact general Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2013). Our recommendations would need to be adapted to make them applicable to non-liberal democratic communities.
9 Europol, “Europol’s Internet Referral Unit to Combat Terrorist and Violent Extremist Propaganda,” https://www.europol.europa.eu/newsroom/news/europol%E2%80%99s-internet-referral-unit-to-combat-terrorist-and-violent-extremist-propaganda (accessed October 10, 2019).
10 For example in the first quarter of 2018, Facebook took down or added a warning to 1.9 million pieces of VE content– 99% of which Facebook found themselves, see Monika Bickert and Brian Fishman, “Hard Questions: How Effective Is Technology in Keeping Terrorists off Facebook?,” About Facebook (blog), April 23, 2018, https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/keeping-terrorists-off-facebook/.
11 Peter R. Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online Radicalization in the United States,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 36, no. 6 (2013): 431–59, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2013.784568.
12 Ibid., 443.
13 Kent Walker, “Four Steps We’re Taking Today to Fight Terrorism Online,” The Keyword | Google (blog), June 18, 2017, https://blog.google/around-the-globe/google-europe/four-steps-were-taking-today-fight-online-terror/.
14 The project was initiated by Jigsaw a unit within Google, in collaboration with Moonshot CVE, Quantum Communications, and a team of researchers including Valens Global and Nadia Oweidat. See Google, “The Redirect Method: A Blueprint for Bypassing Extremism,” https://redirectmethod.org/downloads/RedirectMethod-FullMethod-PDF.pdf (accessed October 10, 2019); A similar pilot project has been set up by Microsoft on their search engine platform “Bing” in conjunction with the Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD). See Microsoft, “Microsoft Partners with Institute for Strategic Dialogue and NGOs to Discourage Online Radicalization to Violence - Microsoft on the Issues,” Microsoft Corporate Blog (blog), April 18, 2017, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2017/04/18/microsoft-partners-institute-strategic-dialogue-ngos-discourageonline-radicalization-violence/.
15 Google, “The Redirect Method: A Blueprint for Bypassing Extremism.”
16 Rachel Briggs and Sebastien Feve, “Review of Programs to Counter Narratives of Violent Extremism” (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, London, 2013).
17 Patricia Crosby and Assan Ali, “Counter Narratives for Countering Violent Extremism,” https://thecommonwealth.org/sites/default/files/inline/ComSec%20CVE%20Counter%20Narratives%20Presentation.pdf (accessed October 10, 2019); Haroro J. Ingram and Alastair Reed, “Lessons from History for Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communications” (The International Centre for Counter-terrorism, The Hague, 2016); Alastair Reed, Haroro J. Ingram, and Joe Whittaker, “Countering Terrorist Narratives” (PE 596.829, Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs, Brussels, 2017).
18 This draws from a distinction between “black” vs. “white” propaganda, in which “white” is government branded and “black” is unbranded or branded under a false flag. For more on this, see Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion, (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1986); Jason Stanley, How Propaganda Works, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
19 The objective is not to “win the argument,” as such, but to draw the extremist into sustained debate, and gradually sow the seeds of doubt that leads to them begin to question their beliefs.
20 Briggs and Feve, “Review of Programs to Counter Narratives of Violent Extremism.”
21 Institute for Strategic Dialogue, “Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI) - ISD A civic response to online hate,” https://www.isdglobal.org/programmes/communications-technology/online-civil-courage-initiative-2-2/ (accessed October 10, 2019).
22 Jacob Davey, Jonathan Birdwell, and Rebecca Skellet, “Counter Conversations - A Model for Direct Engagement with Individuals Showing Signs of Radicalisation Online - Executive Summary” (Institute for Strategic Dialogue, London, 2018).
23 Guy Berger, “Media and Information Literacy: Educational Strategies for the Prevention of Violent Extremism” (speech presented at UNAOC's Media and Information Literacy program, United Nations Headquarters, New York, United States, February 10, 2017).
24 Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online Radicalization”; European Commission, “Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions: Supporting the Prevention of Radicalisation Leading to Violent Extremism,” https://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regdoc/rep/1/2016/EN/COM-2016-379-F1-EN-MAIN-PART-1.PDF (accessed June 14, 2016).
25 Ratna Ghosh, W.Y. Alice Chan, Ashley Manuel, and Maihemuti Dilimulati, “Can Education Counter Violent Religious Extremism?,” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 23, no. 2 (2017): 117-33, https://doi.org/10.1080/11926422.2016.1165713.
26 Neumann, “Options and Strategies for Countering Online Radicalization”; Crosby and Ali, “Counter Narratives for Countering Violent Extremism”; Extremely Together, “Countering Violent Extremism: A Peer-to-Peer Guide by Extremely Together,” http://www.extremelytogether-theguide.org/ (accessed October 10, 2019).
27 For a set of discussions around liberalism, free belief, free speech and free communication see Schauer, Free Speech; Raphael Cohen-Almagor, The Boundaries of Liberty and Tolerance: The Struggle against Kahanism in Israel (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994); Frederick Schauer, “Free Speech On Tuesdays,” Law and Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2015): 119–40; Anne Showalter, “Resolving the Tension Between Free Speech and Hate Speech: Assessing the Global Convergence Hypothesis,” Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law 26, no. 2 (2016): 377–415; van Mill, “Freedom of Speech.”
28 Schauer, Free Speech; van Mill, “Freedom of Speech.”
29 Schauer, Free Speech.
30 EU Internet Referral Unit, “On the Importance of Taking-down Non-Violent Terrorist Content,” VOX - Pol (blog), May 8, 2019, https://www.voxpol.eu/on-the-importance-of-taking-down-non-violent-terrorist-content/.
31 van Mill, “Freedom of Speech.”
32 Stephen L. Darwall, “Two Kinds of Respect,” Ethics 88, no. 1 (1977): 36–49, https://doi.org/10.1086/292054.
33 John Weckert, “Giving and Taking Offence in a Global Context,” International Journal of Technology and Human Interaction 3, no. 3 (2007): 25–35.
34 “Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919), https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/249/47/.
35 van Mill, “Freedom of Speech.”
36 This is a simplification of virtue ethics, focusing on the character-as-repetition aspect of virtue ethics. For more on virtue ethics, see Aristotle and W. David Ross, The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, trans. W. David Ross, (London: Oxford University Press, 1972); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
37 This terminology of “virtue” draws from the Aristotelian notion of virtue where what matters is a person’s character. And this character is created through habit. That is, a person’s virtuous character arises from habit, what they do regularly or repeatedly.
38 BBC News, “Twitter Bans Alex Jones and Infowars,” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45442417 (accessed September 6, 2018).
39 Josh Taylor and Julia Carrie Wong, “Cloudflare Cuts off Far-Right Message Board 8chan after El Paso Shooting | US News | The Guardian,” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/05/cloudflare-8chan-matthew-prince-terminate-service-cuts-off-far-right-message-board-el-paso-shooting (accessed August 5, 2019); Matthew Prince, “Terminating Service for 8Chan,” Cloudflare (blog), August 5, 2019, https://blog.cloudflare.com/terminating-service-for-8chan/.
40 We recognise that the term ‘significant’ here does a lot of the heavy lifting and is undefined. While we recognise that what counts as significant is likely an open and contested area, what we note is the role that significance plays in free speech constraints. Two influential commentators on hate speech, Jeremy Waldron and David Boonin both “agree that prohibition is acceptable when speech is threatening; they disagree on what counts as a harmful threat. Waldron thinks most forms of racial abuse qualify whereas Boonin is more circumspect. But the disagreement between the two is about what causes harm rather than any major philosophical difference about the appropriate limits on speech. If both agree that a threat constitutes a significant harm, then both will support censorship” van Mill, “Freedom of Speech.”
41 Fish, There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech.
42 Steven Heyman, “The First Duty of Government: Protection, Liberty and the Fourteenth Amendment,” Duke Law Journal 41 (1991): 507.
43 Thomas Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000); Ann Cudd, “Contractarianism (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2013 Edition),” https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/contractarianism/ (accessed October 10, 2019); Fred D’Agostino, Gerald Gaus, and John Thrasher, “Contemporary Approaches to the Social Contract (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Winter 2012 Edition)” https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/contractarianism-contemporary/ (accessed October 10, 2019).
44 Claudia Aradau, “Security That Matters: Critical Infrastructure and Objects of Protection,” Security Dialogue 41, no. 5 (2010): 491–514, https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010610382687.
45 We thank Kateira Aryaeinejad for raising this point.
46 Jeffrey Moriarty, “Business Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2017 Edition),” https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/ethics-business/ (accessed October 10, 2019).
47 Seumas Miller, The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions: A Philosophical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
48 Steve Kirsch, “Identifying Terrorists before They Strike,” http://www.skirsch.com/politics/plane/ultimate.htm (accessed October 7, 2001); Emma Woollacott, “The Algorithm That Can Predict Isis’s next Move - before They Even Know What It Is,” https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2015/09/algorithm-can-predict-isis-s-next-move-they-even-know-what-it (accessed September 24, 2015).
49 J. H. Moor, “Are There Decisions Computers Should Never Make,” Nature And System 1, no. 4 (1979): 217–29.
50 Mark Coeckelbergh, “Artificial Intelligence: Some Ethical Issues and Regulatory Challenges,” Technology and Regulation, (2019), 31–34, https://doi.org/10.26116/TECHREG.2019.003.
51 Austin Carr, “When Jack Dorsey’s Fight Against Twitter Trolls Got Personal,” Fast Company (blog), April 9, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/40549979/when-jack-dorseys-fight-against-twitter-trolls-got-personal.
52 Stuart Macdonald, Daniel Grinnell, Anina Kinzel, and Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, “A Study of Outlinks Contained in Tweets Mentioning ‘Rumiyah’” (Global Research Network on Terrorism and Technology: Paper No. 2, Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, London, UK, 2019).
53 Walker, “Four Steps We’re Taking Today to Fight Terrorism Online”; Reddit Announcements, “Revamping the Quarantine Function: Announcements,” https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/9jf8nh/revamping_the_quarantine_function/ (accessed December 15, 2018); Del Harvey and David Gasca, “Serving Healthy Conversation,” https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/product/2018/Serving_Healthy_Conversation.html (accessed May 15, 2018).
54 Adam Henschke and Timothy Legrand, “Counterterrorism Policy in Liberal-Democratic Societies: Locating the Ethical Limits of National Security,” Australian Journal of International Affairs 71, no. 5 (2017): 544–61, https://doi.org/10.1080/10357718.2017.1342764.
55 We note here the concerns about manipulation of citizens by their governments and the fact that governments do actively intervene in the beliefs and motivations of their citizens. Governments in liberal democracies do routinely engage in ‘communication campaigns’ that have, in part, the purpose of manipulating their citizens into thinking good things about the government. What we suggest is that transparency plays an important role. While some forms of government propaganda on their own citizens are perhaps inevitable, we can perhaps differentiate between white, grey and black propaganda depending on “an acknowledgement of its source and its accuracy of information” Jowett and O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion. Much more needs to be said about these issues, but is beyond the scope of this paper.
56 Allard R. Feddes and Marcello Gallucci, “A Literature Review on Methodology Used in Evaluating Effects of Preventive and De-Radicalisation Interventions,” Journal for Deradicalization, no. 5 (2015): 1–27; Kurt Braddock and John Horgan, “Towards a Guide for Constructing and Disseminating Counternarratives to Reduce Support for Terrorism,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism 39, no. 5 (2016): 381–404, https://doi.org/10.1080/1057610X.2015.1116277; B. Heidi Ellis and Saida Abdi, “Building Community Resilience to Violent Extremism through Genuine Partnerships,” The American Psychologist 72, no. 3 (2017): 289–300, https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000065.
57 For more on this point, see Adam Henschke, Ethics in an Age of Surveillance: Personal Information and Virtual Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
58 By “pre-extremist” we mean online or other activity that is in itself neither extremist nor violent, but shows tendencies to evolve into extremism or violence.
59 Woollacott, “The Algorithm That Can Predict Isis’s next Move – before They Even Know What It Is.”
60 Daniel J. Solove, Understanding Privacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
61 Logan Macnair and Richard Frank, “Voices Against Extremism: A Case Study of a Community-Based CVE Counter-Narrative Campaign,” Journal for Deradicalization 0, no. 10 (2017): 147–74.
62 Henschke, Ethics in an Age of Surveillance. 213–14.
63 Shandon Harris-Hogan, Kate Barrelle, and Andrew Zammit, “What Is Countering Violent Extremism? Exploring CVE Policy and Practice in Australia,” Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression 8, no. 1 (2016): 6–24, https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2015.1104710.
64 Feddes and Gallucci, “A Literature Review on Methodology”
65 Ibid., 309.
66 Shelly Kagan, Normative Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).
67 It is important to note there that that the terms of service are clear, transparent, and easy to understand. Fine print and overly legal terminology, or even too much terminology inhibits a consumer’s ability to actually give informed consent. We thank Kateira Aryaeinejad for this point.
68 Yvette Tan, “A Guy’s Twitter Account Got Suspended after He Made a Death Threat—against a Mosquito,” Mashable (blog), August 30, 2017, https://mashable.com/2017/08/30/twitter-japan-mosquitos-abuse/.
69 Ibid.
70 Paul S. Appelbaum, “Tarasoff and the Clinician: Problems in Fulfilling the Duty to Protect,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 142, no. 4 (1985): 425–29, https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.142.4.425.
71 We note here that something like a notion of ‘simple proportionality’ is in fact quite complex. For more on the complexity of proportionality, see Adam Henschke, “Conceptualising Proportionality And Its Relation to Metadata,” in Intelligence and the Function of Government, by Daniel Baldino and Rhy Crawley (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2018).
72 For instance, as discussed elsewhere, counter-terrorism policy can be limited by reference to the very values it seeks to protect. See Henschke and Legrand, “Counterterrorism Policy in Liberal-Democratic Societies.”