Edward C. Baig
USA TODAY
Published 11:25 AM EDT Jun 24, 2019
The Anti-Defamation League is fighting the KKK and white supremacists with online marketing and targeted advertising techniques tied to Google search and curated YouTube videos.
The ADL, Moonshot CVE and the Gen Next Foundation are joining forces in the U.S. to apply the Redirect Method, a program that steers individuals who search online for violent or extremist content to material that exposes the falsehoods and hatred and directs them to non-violent alternatives.
The Redirect Method was born out of a partnership in 2016 among Googles Jigsaw tech incubator, the Google-backed London-based Moonshot start-up, and the U.S.-based Gen Next Foundation. The goal was to meet the enemy online and go toe-to-toe with their efforts to market themselves to vulnerable youth.
Early on, that meant redirecting people searching for violent Jihadism or far-right content toward YouTube videos that debunked hate groups recruiting efforts. According to Moonshot, an estimated 320,906 unique users clicked on the Redirect Method's pilot ads.
The latest use of the Redirect Method to fight white supremacists is expected to run about a year.
“This is just a pilot project, and I have no illusions that its going to alone solve the problem,” says ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt. “But a model developed on the basis of interviews with ISIS defectors and how they were sort of radicalized – it makes sense to try to use it to tackle other types of violent extremist discourses. Whatever we can do to try to neutralize this threat before it takes hold I think is worth a try.”
The Rand Corp. also recommended as part of a case study on the Redirect Method to enlist the assistance of former extremists who can help assess whether Google Ads and video content shown to those searching for hate content is entertaining, accurate and potentially persuasive.
The ADL has been monitoring extremist activities for generations, so its familiarity with the code words, phrasings, iconography and core ideology of the various hate groups can help supplement the ad-words used as part of the Redirect Method.
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Far-right and Jihadi searches often include historic “hero” figures such as Hitler, Timothy McVeigh and Osama bin Laden.
There is also a clear link between offline events and online searches. Around the time of the violent protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, for example, there was a huge spike in searches to join the Ku Klux Klan.
The Redirect Method doesnt prevent a person from still visiting extremist destinations online. And there may be legitimate academic purposes to go to such sites.
What the Redirect Method does do, however, is place ads and links for the alternative non-violent sites at the top of Googles search results, where the advertising click-through rates tend to be the highest.
"Before the Redirect Method existed, there was quite literally an unobstructed path to terrorist and extremist content," says Jenielle Alonso, chief communications officer at Gen Next. "
