Media reports of the international coalition against ISIS in Iraq and Syria indicate that the organization is receiving painful blows that have resulted in its retreat from the territory it has controlled in recent years. Hundreds of ISIS members continue to flee in search of safe shelters in the cities and villages, which is a fact that reflects a high probability of the organization’s defeat within the remaining months of this year.
There is a new western study that suggests that the West, including the United Kingdom, is already losing its battle against extremism on the Internet. The study by the Centre on Religion and Geopolitics in the UK shows that extremist web content is expanding and spreading in an unprecedented manner. The study also confirms that the anti-extremist content produced by the British government represents only about 5% of the randomly-selected web content.
The West is making great efforts to address extremist content via the Internet, whether through legal or technical mechanisms, but the most important is that there are reports that talk about removing a lot of this content. In this context, there is a report that indicates that the British authorities have removed about 250,000 online posts linked to extremism. A joint unit of the Metropolitan Police Service and the British Ministry of the Interior Affairs removes about 2,000 pieces of online extremist content every week. The latest study indicates that there are nearly half a million searches per month on Google about extremist content around the world, including about 56 thousand searches in the UK.
These results are inaccurate because they include searches for other purposes such as news gathering and research; still, these reports are a vital indicator of the massive interaction with extremist content via the Internet.
The study also concluded that a person is not supposed to become an extremist on social networking sites at first, but rather he may form his new knowledge during Internet searches before moving on to social media. Research on Internet engines may provide the person with many articles related to extremism. The same person may then turn to the social media and engage in the so-called ideological recruitment and virtual training camps.
These are real features of the spread of extremist content via the Internet in the West. The institutions in the Arab and Islamic world must undertake similar studies and research in order to identify the results of their efforts in face of extremism in the virtual world over the past years.
It may be assumed that there are tremendous efforts to spread moderation in the Arab and Islamic world, and this is a fact that I do not question at all. Governmental efforts are being made in many Arab and Islamic countries to spread the culture of moderation and counteract radical thought. We must identify answers to several points, most importantly about the size of moderate content compared to the extremist content, the limits of the impact of moderate content, the rates of increase and spread of moderate and extremist contents, and other vital questions in order to pursue effort according to a clear strategic vision in the foreseeable future.
The British government considered that the spread of extremist content via the Internet is a complex issue. The British government takes this challenge seriously, while the Arab and Islamic world do not put such things to be subject to scientific research, except some Arab countries that adopt a clear scientific and strategic approach to confront extremist thought. The UAE was the first to establish research centres specialized in combating extremist ideologies such as Hedayah and Sawab, which are two models that confront extremism via the internet.
