Web 2.0 and Overcoming Extremism

Here's an interesting wrinkle in the conventional wisdom about terrorist use of the internet. We last checked in on this issue with Daniel Kimmage and Kathleen Ridolfo's report The War of Images and Ideas. Ridolfo was a speaker at our Overcoming Extremism conference last October (video of her panel, The Changing Media Landscape, can be found here). Kimmage and Ridolfo are back with a new study on Al-Qaeda's internet presence and it turns out that Web 2.0 technologies - user-driven content, social networking software, wikis, etc. - have left extremist groups "a bit behind the curve." Al-Qaeda's efforts to monopolize information and control content act as a counter to the dynamism and creativity associated with Web 2.0. We recommended using a mix of methods, including the latest online innovations, to act against extremist elements in our conference final report (and further examined the technology in Wikis, Webs, and Networks). For now, Al-Qaeda's seeming inability to evolve and take advantage of the newest online tools is an exploitable weakness.