Halting the Flow of Terrorist Propaganda with AI

Extremist groups like ISIS have used the internet to propagate their ideologies and recruit individuals for more than a decade. Social media played an important role in the rise of ISIS [1], and increased terrorist activity online is described by the United Nations Office of Counter Terrorism as practically synonymous with modern terrorism [2]. The amount of ISIS-related content is staggering; hundreds of millions of pieces of extremist information are posted on the internet every year. A major problem is identifying ISIS propaganda in the first place; the group evades detection in numerous ways, including mixing their material with content from legitimate news outlets, blurring ISIS branding, and hijacking Facebook accounts [3]. When you combine the evasive tactics with highly heterogeneous and dynamic online environments, traditional content analysis fails to properly characterize which online material is extremist in origin and which is not.