Channel News Asia: How Video-Streaming Platforms Feed Hate and Sow Divisions and What We Can Do About It

Working with Platforms to Address Self-Radicalisation

Weeding out radicals before they can carry out their terror plans has long been the holy grail for counterterrorism efforts. There are opportunities to do so by collaborating with digital platforms.

But where attention may have focused on dealing with YouTube’s algorithms, motivating the platform to enforce community guidelines may be more productive, as this hones in on getting tech giants to clean up their repositories of problematic content.

This could entail incentivising and supporting moves to hire more moderators or applying technology to improve moderation.

Today, YouTube has at least 10,000 moderators, engineers and policy specialists reviewing content and content moderation technologies worldwide – a resource worth tapping into.

Significantly, authorities could share information with platform content moderators, community moderators, trusted content creators and platform users, to help them gain a better understanding of how past instances of self-radicalisation developed, and inform efforts to identify new, potentially problematic content.

Information sharing can also be reciprocal, as community and content moderators are valuable sources of intelligence on extreme content.

They are regularly exposed to questionable videos and can provide insights on how such material develops and propagates within their platform’s ecosystem, as well as how creators attempt to fly under the radar and avoid moderation.

Content creators acting as community leaders can additionally aid in distributing rehabilitative messaging – an approach proven by research to undermine the manipulative effects of radical doctrine.

Cultivating such alliances can provide government a ground-level view of trends in digital platform spaces and keep pace with the amorphousness of these online communities.

Digital platforms would in turn be able to demonstrate good corporate citizenship by proactively convening and organising such opportunities.

Mapping Extremist Communities

Through this mutual exchange of information, both government agencies and digital platforms like YouTube may also be able to achieve a more dynamic understanding of how extremism develops, aiding in efforts by all stakeholders to curb self-radicalisation.

An example of how this nuance matters can be found in a comparison of the “anti-woke” community with the far-right community, which are sometimes treated interchangeably, because they use similar vocabulary and memes, and draw from similar demographics.

However, research on their YouTube consumption indicates that “anti-woke” and far-right communities are two distinct entities that differ in subtle but important ways.

“Anti-woke” and far-right content might both address a perceived overextension of social justice movements.

However, while anti-woke commentators might advocate for a dialling back of woke rhetoric, far-right extremists might proceed to make dangerous inferences about ideological “invasions” or make divisive assertions regarding the role of particular groups in promoting a woke agenda.

Enforcement resources should focus on the smaller but much more extreme far-right elements instead getting caught up in more widespread and less immediately problematic anti-woke content.

In Singapore’s multicultural context, understanding exchanges on multilingual channels can also help identify sources of divisive narratives promoting regressive attitudes on other cultures and fuelling societal tensions from non-English speaking sources.

Large-scale influence operations promulgated through Chinese-language ecosystems, via platforms like Bilibili, Weibo and WeChat, were discovered by research firm FireEye just this month.

Additionally, the growth of socially divisive rhetoric in Hindi, Sinhala and Tamil has contributed to communal violence in India and Sri Lanka.

Holistic Vigilance

The task of curtailing radical content can seem like fighting a multi-headed hydra. Harsh attempts to eliminate threats only drive extremist communities underground briefly, before they re-emerge more numerous than before and on opaque platforms like Telegram.

Maintaining open communication and information sharing between government and industry is thus vital to striking a balance between controlling the spread of radical ideology and managing their migration to darker corners of the Internet.

Situating video-streaming platforms like YouTube within wider networks of radicalisation can create opportunities for collaboration with platforms to develop innovative countermeasures.

This grows all the more important as more content, conversations and communities migrate online, including on other platforms such as audio communication channels like Clubhouse, also grappling with the growth of extremism.

With a more holistic, community-based and industry-aligned approach, however, Singapore can ensure that we remain resilient and responsive to new threats of radicalisation.

Gareth Tan is an analyst at Access Partnership, a public policy consultancy focusing on technology. These are his own views.