There is an interesting piece in the Guardian that looks at the role the internet plays, and internet search providers play, in the facilitation of radicalisation. I had never considered this before. As the article states:
More than 484,000 Google keyword searches a month from around the world, including at least 54,000 searches in the UK, return results dominated by Islamist extremist material, a report into the online presence of jihadism has revealed.
The study is one of the first to expose the role of the search engine rather than social media in drawing people to extremist jihadi material on the web. It argues the role of the search engine – a field dominated by Google – has been a blind spot that has been missed by those seeking to measure and counter extremist messages on the internet….
The study, entitled A War of Keywords: how extremists are exploiting the internet and what to do about it, argues “many of the legitimate mainstream Islamic scholarly websites host extremist material, including jihadi material, often without any warning or safeguards in place”.
It also argues non-violent Islamist organisations, such as Hizb ut-Tahrir, have a very strong online presence and dominate the results for some keyword searches. Some of the most popular search words used were crusader, martyr, kafir (non-believer), khilafa (a pan-Islamic state) or apostate.
In a condemnation of government efforts it finds very little of this content is challenged online. Analysing 47 relevant keywords, the search-engine analysis found counter-narrative content outperformed extremist content in only 11% of the results generated. For the search term khilafah, which has 10,000 global monthly searches, the ratio of extremist content to counter-narrative is nine to one.
This is partly because counter-narrative sites lack search engine optimisation so they do not rank high enough in searches, By contrast, Khilafa.com, the English website of Hizb ut-Tahrir, had more than 100,000 links into it.
The study also warns some of the most-used Muslim websites such as Kalmullah.com and WorldofIslam.info “host traditional Islamic content alongside extremist material” so are knowingly or unknowingly abusing the trust of their readers.
The study also claims a user can come across extremist content relatively easily while browsing for Islamic literature. Few effective restrictions apply to accessing Islamic State English-language magazine Dabiq or Inspire magazine, which is linked to al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula. Both are readily available to browse and download through clearing sites.