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Source: ONE News
Western governments have overstated the role the internet plays
in the recruitment of militants, and measures to block extremist
material are crude, expensive and counterproductive, a report
said.
Any attempts to filter or restrict access to sites grooming
potential suicide bombers would be impractical and ineffective,
said the study by the International Centre for the Study of
Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) in London.
In fact there was little politicians could do, said the report,
which brought together government, industry and experts to look at
the issue.
"Self-radicalisation and self-recruitment via the internet with
little or no relation to the outside world rarely happens, and
there is no reason to suppose that this situation will change in
the near future," it said.
"Indeed it is largely ineffective at drawing in new
recruits."
For years, governments and security agencies have warned that the
web was allowing extremists, particularly Islamist militants, to
recruit and radicalise people to their causes.
Former US Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff once said
recruits no longer needed to travel to al Qaeda camps overseas, and
the European Commission has suggested trying to block online
searches for material such as bomb-making recipes.
Last week a report found extremist groups in Southeast Asia were
increasingly using the web to radicalise youths.
Fears misplaced
However, the study suggested fears about the radicalising power of
the internet appeared misplaced.
Peter Neumann, head of the ICSR, said there had been only four
or five reported cases across Europe where the process had taken
place wholly online.
He said that Internet Service Providers could do more to deal with
users' complaints about extremist material, and governments would
regulate if the ISPs failed to bring in a system to better police
content.
But it was a fallacy that there is some sort of switch that can be
pressed and you can eliminate all extremist radicalising content
from the internet.
Officials have argued that it should be possible to filter militant
material in the same way authorities crack down on child
pornography.
But the report said this analogy was flawed: issues surrounding
militant content are less clear cut, and it is politically hard to
decide what is illegal and what is merely
offensive.
Removed websites can soon crop up again using a different
Internet Service Provider (ISP); filtering methods are either too
crude (because they block legitimate sites), too expensive (as they
need constant updating), or they impede internet traffic.
Meanwhile almost nothing can be done to target chat rooms, and
networking sites, the report said,
While most of the focus has been on al Qaeda-inspired Islamist
militants, far-right white supremacist sites are equally as
popular, the report found.
