Thread by @nixmalik

Good afternoon. To round off the week, I’m sharing some analysis I’ve done on counter terrorism prosecutions in 2018.

People often ask me the “role” of social media and the internet in radicalisation and extremism. These cases and stats are a good start (but not whole picture)

In 2018 to date, there have been 25 counter terrorism prosecutions. 20 of these have had some element of the internet or tech involved - whether to prosecute terrorist material, communicate, or spread hatred and stir up religious controversy.

4 of the 20 cases to do with internet- related terrorism prosecutions involved someone “young”. Youth could often be deemed by the judge to be up to 19 years of age and involved time in a young offenders’ institute as punishment

Interestingly - all of the youth involved were posting, disseminating, and planning attacks related to Islamic State. Many of them had planned to travel to Islamic State, including a young Sikh girl who converted to Islam.

60% of the internet-related counter-terrorism prosecutions had to do with material that was being shared that was Islamist in nature. 40% had to do with the Far Right.

Far Right material included hatred against Black people, Jewish people, and Muslims.

Now the trends: people prosecuted for terrorism who spread material and planned hate attacks in the Far Right tended to use two platforms to do this - Twitter and Facebook. The majority of the offenders (75%) disseminated material on Facebook.

This included the creation of Facebook pages threatening violence against Muslims, religious hatred, and tweets against black people. Most perpetrators were mobilised to express views openly after a terrorist attack - London Bridge for example. But others were just plain racist.

For Islamist related content, the platform used was far more complex. This indicates that perpetrators are getting better at hiding their messages. 33% of them used encryption to communicate

Some interesting trends in dissemination
- the use of “weaponised” Facebook accounts (accounts with no legitimate purpose) to disseminate Daesh propaganda
- Translation of videos on how to make explosives
- Makeshift and self-made YouTube videos celebrating death through nasheeds

- The use of Instagram to attack non-believers
- The creation of new, self-made terrorist flags
- The use of Twitter to spread hatred against Shias
- Use of computer software to create imitation “in conversation” videos with hate preachers such as Awlaki

Some more to come on Monday. Hope you find the above trends helpful and have a good weekend.

Continuing on this analysis (slight delay due to recent developments). Of the successful prosecutions in 2018 to date, 80% have had some element of the internet involved in radicalisation. Only one of these cases had to do with a woman - a young Sikh girl who converted to Islam.

Those who shared Islamist related content were as likely to do so on open source as those who released Far Right hatred. However, Islamists tended to share more private messages - indicating that the Far Right cases were more confident for their material to be publicly available

Interestingly, most offenders who shared these posts with public or messages with friends were told by then that the content was offensive and should be removed or taken down. Islamist offenders were more likely to ignore these requests and keep content online

Finally, Islamist offenders were more likely to receive a punishment of more than 2 years imprisonment than those who loaded hate content from the Far Right. Now I’m no legal expert, but the trends and differences I noticed in their pleas were interesting ...

Far Right offenders were more likely to show remorse, admit they were “disgusted” with themselves for sharing such content, and plead guilty and admit to sharing the posts. This resulted in sentencing being imposed at the bottom of the sentencing range

Here’s a graph of average imprisonment terms for each category. For the Islamist related offenders, sentences could be as high as 8,9, and 11 years imprisonment. For the Far Right, the highest prison sentence was four years, with most being under 2 yrs given.

Will add more details of the cases and intra-case analysis of 2018 (as more successful prosecutions come in). I’ll also be comparing this to the data we have from 1998 onwards (the last 20 years) to look at whether internet has played a bigger role. Stay tuned ...!