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Comment by simonh | Hacker News Reader

I suppose to the extent these channels of communication recruit and radicalise, if they are shut down they will not be able to recruit and radicalise. The act of shutting them down might infuriate regular users of these channels, but they’re already radicalised anyway.

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What you end up with is recruitment. If the user remains on Reddit or Twitter they're exposed to the gamut of human thought. However extreme they may be, they're still attached, there may exist some sort of analogue for a cleavage furrow, but nonetheless the cell remains. It's only at the point where you've so alienated and shorn their attachment to the whole that they become a fully independent entity, and that they become truly radicalized. And having observed this, I can say with sincerity that they move deeper into the domain of extremity.

The point someone is “recruited” is subjective. Either ways cutting out new recruits is a great solution.

There is little evidence that radicalization happens online [1]. It seems to require in-person contact to really take root.

[1] https://www.rand.org/randeurope/research/projects/internet-a...

I promise you from personal experience, radicalization does happen online too.

That research was published by a libertarian think tank in 2013. Since then, there have been numerous examples of lone wolf terrorist attacks where the perpetrators appeared to have no offline contacts with extremist groups. See: New Zealand shooting, Pittsburgh shooting, etc.

There were also lone wolf mass shootings before the internet, so what does this prove?

That radicalisation does not exclusively happen face to face and that it can be conducted on line, by newsletter, by book, by carrier pigeon.

This “study” has been proven to be obviously and demonstrably incorrect in the years since it was published. The authors should retract.

source?

Have you read the conclusions of the study? Do they comport with events of the past 5 years? Not at all

If you are going to claim a study is bunk then link another study proving it. empty statements like that prove nothing. that's not science.

This study was not really science. They interviewed a few people and then applied their own qualitative analysis to conclude that people cannot be self radicalized fully online. Since they published the study, there have been several major terrorist attacks perpetrated by individuals fully radicalized online.

I see. Your source is moral panicking in the news and journalists psychic ability to determine that dangerous radicalism is on the rise without ever bothering with any sort of data collection. Who could argue with that?

I'd like to recommend this podcast about online radicalization, produced by the NYTimes: https://www.nytimes.com/column/rabbit-hole

If ISIS can recruit in person by talking to vulnerable people in the right mosques, surely other extremists have backup channels as well.

But surely fewer channels means fewer recruits? Ultimately it's about what kind of content these platforms want to publish though.

It might also mean "higher quality recruits".

And that’s okay. Fewer “higher quality” recruits are easier to go after individually.

History says that well-organized, even if smaller movements, have higher chances of achieving their goals.

I can recommend this article about inefficiency of online movements:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/05/in-pe...

You can say the same about forces that work against the criminals as well except they’re well organized and have larger numbers.

Your link doesn’t take into account if the chilling effect is what leads to ephemeral online hate movements.

The more someone has to rely on backup channels and then backups of the back channel, the less likely you enroll new members.

As I said elsewhere in this thread (and linked to an article on similar topic), success isn't measured by sheer numbers of lukewarm sympathisers alone.

It is not as if George Washington or the Civil Rights Movement recruited masses of followers online. They started with relatively small but cohesive units. Yes, it took them longer than it takes today to assemble a flash mob. But the efficiency measured by capability was higher than today.

For an example, if I were a German cop, I would be much more concerned about the mostly-offline groups such as the Reichsburger or the Grey Wolves (Turkish nationalists). They linger around for decades and are hard to penetrate, unlike whatever wild crowd you can put together on Facebook. That Facebook group will look scary, but it won't have much pull after 5 years, because it competes with a ton of other Facebook groups for attention.

Even so, it makes very little sense to provide a platform to these hardcore organizations to continue to recruit from. The dismantling of the old KKK in the United States is a great success story to work off of.

Person to person doesn't scale as well as the internet.

Again: yes, it does not scale as well. But scale to what? Silicon Valley is generally obsessed with quick growth without thinking about long term impact. But politics is generally long term.

It is easy to put together a temporary, unstable mob of people in virtual reality. But real political impact of such mobs tends to be superficial.

Impactful organizations such as, well, the Taliban, sacrifice rapid growth and substitute it with higher-quality personal connections.

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