The Internet Is Facilitating Online Radicalisation. Should It Be Regulated?

From Maiduguri to London, Manchester, Paris, Somalia, Kenya and Kabul, all these cities or countries have something in common. They have all experienced devastating terrorist attacks that have killed dozens of innocent people as well as the Jihadi or suicide bomber.

These so-called terrorists led by the Islamic State have been evolving various means to spread their ideology and violence in different parts of the world. The most virile and effective one is through the internet.

Today, you simply need to share a tasteless video of a jihadi beheading a western captive from America or Britain or the video of a charismatic demented Imam preaching a twisted version of Islam encouraging young Muslims from different parts of the world to fight for their religion by killing people by whatever means necessary. And before you know it, a naive young Muslim in Paris, London, Istanbul, and Newyork feels his religion is under attack, take up the challenge and go on the rampage.

A classic example is what happened on Saturday, June 3 in London when a vehicle rammed into pedestrians that scrambled for safety. It didn’t end there, three young men jumped out of the white bus wielding 12 inches knife and cut people as if they were cutting trees. The Metropolitan police shot the three of them dead within 8 minutes of getting the distress call. At the end, 7 people were killed and 48 injured.

Then, you begin to wonder what got into the heads of these young men? You will be shocked to know these guys did not come in contact with an Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of murderous ISIS. But, they had access to all their hate speeches online. In fact, you only need to Google how to make a bomb and order bomb-making materials to produce it.

To further back up the fact that the internet is facilitating radicalisation, a research by The RAND Corporation can be cited. Their research titled radicalisation in the digital era focused on the use of the internet in 15 cases of terrorism and extremism in the United Kingdom.

According to the result, the internet: “supports the suggestion that it may enhance opportunities to become radicalised, as a result of being available to many people, and enabling connection with like-minded individuals from across the world 24/7. For all 15 individuals that were researched, the internet had been a key source of information, communication and of propaganda for their extremist beliefs.

In another research, conducted by Oxford University in 2015, it confirms that “Social networking is the main activity young people aged 16-24 use the internet for, something which extremist groups are well aware of. This is why they are using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to draw young people to their cause.”

In all these confusion, the tech giants cannot me isolated from this online radicalisation problem. The companies include Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and Twitter.

Although, last year, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Microsoft agreed to team up to tackle extremist content. The tech companies plan to create a shared database of ‘unique digital fingerprints’ that can identify images and videos promoting terrorism.

This is quite commendable but there is so much more to be done to check these radical contents that are freely available and distributed at the click of a button.

As the tech giants are making their efforts, the government must face the reality that someday and somehow, they probably have to consider regulating the access to the internet.

This is because if they win the offline war, there cannot be any celebration because the online radicalisation has not been dealt with.  They can probably achieve this by regulating access to the internet by working closely with the tech giants.

Parents can also be factored in. However, parents are not ready to monitor the internet usage of their children.This is because they are too busy to do so. How this would happen, they have to decide.

However, ignoring the discourse about regulating internet access will only continue to embolden the terrorists and more and more unsuspecting young people will be radicalised and recruited by ISIS and other terrorist groups who inspire them to carry out deadly terrorist attacks.