Marketing the anti-extremism message to millennials

(Photo illustration: Yahoo News, photos: U.S. State Department, FBI/Handout via Reuters)

In October of last year, Tony Sgro got a call from the U.S. National Security Council. As the head of EdVenture Partners, a company whose self-described mission is to connect clients with the “valuable and powerful millennial market,” he was more accustomed to thinking about how to sell Hondas than how to fight terrorism. But the person calling thought he was uniquely positioned to get out a message the government badly wants millennials to hear: Don’t join the fighters of the Islamic State.

“They said, ‘I’ve got plenty of research about radicalization and [the Islamic State], but nobody’s doing anything to counter the [terrorists in the] online space,’” Sgro told Yahoo News.

Out of that came the idea for a 15-week competition, called Peer 2 Peer: Challenging Extremism. Launched in January by the U.S. State Department, the experimental program enlisted student teams from 23 universities from the U.S., Canada, Australia, Europe, the Persian Gulf and Asia to combat violent extremism with some kind of digital effort — an app, a website or an online initiative. They were all given the same assignment: Target a group of young people — whether it be teens at risk of being recruited by terrorists or apathetic youths — and find a way to engage them in the topic.

In the first week of June, three finalist teams hand-picked by Sgro and several government agencies traveled to the State Department to present their ideas before a panel of judges, which included an American University professor, an ambassador for the United Nations, and the chief of staff at the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office. It was the first and only opportunity for government officials to offer feedback on the projects — partly because the White House knew that if it got involved with editing the messages, no one would listen to them.

“Millennials can speak better to millennials, there’s no question about that,” State Department Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary Kelly Keiderling, who was a judge in the competition, told Yahoo News. “Government employees have an important role to play elsewhere.”

To understand why officials would rather have college students lead this social media charge, you have to first understand the expansive online presence of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, also known as IS, ISIL and ISIS. Since the launch of its Al-Hayat Media Center in spring 2014, the burgeoning terrorist organization has instructed its members to clog every social media feed they can find with propaganda angling to recruit young people, such as Instagram posts of kittens next to AK-47s and BuzzFeed-like listicles about the benefits of the caliphate. The admittedly savvy social media staff’s reach is considerable, with approximately 90,000 tweets and other social media interactions per day, according to a February report in the New York Times.

Its efforts have paid off. More than 60 young Americans from all over the country have traveled to Syria to join the movement, lending the Islamic State their knowledge of everything from bitcoin to Photoshop. The most recent recruit to surface was a 20-year-old Texan, Asher Abid Khan, who was discovered after the FBI reportedly accessed an Islamic State sympathizer’s Facebook account. Khan had been messaging a contact in Turkey, saying, “I don’t want to fight for war booty or for nationalism. I want to just rise the laws of Allah and be [a martyr] in his cause.‘”

Understanding what motivates someone like Khan is a daunting task, which is why teams spent months studying the techniques of Islamic State recruiters and what makes millennials vulnerable to being targeted. The results of their projects, however, differed greatly in audience, depth and message.

Australia’s Curtin University developed an app called 52Jumaa, which aims to offer support for young Muslims. It sends daily positive affirmations about Islam to users’ smartphones, allows them to connect with other Muslims and asks them to complete a selfless act of kindness every Friday, the day of prayer.

Canada’s Mount Royal University launched a prevention campaign called the WANT Movement (which stands for We Are Not Them). The team hosted a series of workshops and seminars that taught the differences between the Islamic faith and the belief systems purported by terrorist organizations.

Screen grab from Missouri State’s website One95. (Photo: One95.org)

Missouri State’s finished product, which won the competition, is the website One95, which serves as an education hub for 195 countries about the dangers of violent extremism. The site provides English-language curriculum for teaching middle-school-age students, otherwise known as Generation Z, about the looming presence of extreme ideological ideas on social media and how to recognize them. It also includes trivia, community boards and videos from people who have been directly affected by terrorism.

And then there were the 11 graduate students at Texas A&M who came up with a site called the Funny Militant, which ran jihadi-centric parodies, including an app for finding a jihadi bride and one called Who’s Your Bagdaddy? Though this humor-based approach did not propel the team to the finals, Sgro said, sharp voices like theirs appeal to millennials.

“It was downright offensive to some people,” Sgro said. “But those people were not the audience. Millennials like sick, weird humor. Who better to develop a social media strategy against extremism than the very audience extremists want to recruit?”

Experts, however, are skeptical about the success of the Peer 2 Peer program, arguing that it doesn’t properly address the real source of frustration that motivates young Muslims to join extremist organizations.

“It seems the State Department’s strategy simply aims to inundate social media with images and themes that can attract people away from ISIS,” Nader Hashemi, the director of the University of Denver’s Center for Middle East Studies, told Yahoo News, “when, fundamentally, the drivers of ISIS are rooted in the broken politics of the Middle East, the absence of hope, repressive regimes, war and state breakdown, and humiliation.”

Other experts question whether these messages are appearing in the right places to reach their targets.

The finalists from Mount Royal University (Canada) and Curtin University (Australia), and the winning team from Missouri State University. (Photo: U.S. State Department)

“If people need to go to a website or download an app to get the content, are the people who need the intervention the most going to be exposed to it?” asked Tony Lemieux, an associate professor at Georgia State University who researches transcultural conflict and violence. “You can’t assume that the right audience is going to find the right message at the right time.”

The State Department wouldn’t disclose specific statistics on who or how many people were reached in the experimental program. But Keiderling said the campaign engaged people in 70 countries, and the winning team’s hashtag, #EndViolentExtremism, reached several million people within a week.

Now, she said, she and her colleagues plan to regroup and discuss what they’ve learned from the presentations. In the meantime, Sgro is already organizing another competition for the next school semester — with twice as many schools participating.