Why Countering Extremism Fails: Washington’s Top-Down Approach to Prevention Is Flawed
Author(s):
In 2014, as a speaker at a countering violent extremism conference, I had to pull the organizers aside for an awkward conversation about a post to my Twitter account. Just before I was about to present, a supporter of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) had publicly tweeted at me: “Kill them, you have their trust.” His logic was simple: The conference would be the perfect opportunity to engage in mass murder because no one would see it coming. He knew that the conference included a number of people who, like me, work daily to push back against the extremist propaganda circulated online by people like him…