Fighting Extremist Social Media with Social Media

For many troubled young people, the path to extremist groups like ISIS starts with the click of a mouse—a phenomenon that one BU class is trying to counter with its online campaign, SAVE: Standing against Violent Extremists.

The campaign, created by the New Media and Public Relations class of Stephen Quigley, a College of Communication associate professor of public relations, is one of about 150 similar efforts entered in the Peer to Peer (P2P): Challenging Extremism competition put together by EdVenture Partners and sponsored by the US Departments of State and of Homeland Security and Facebook. On December 16, judges will choose six finalists, three US teams and three international teams, to travel to Washington, D.C., in February and present their campaigns in the competition’s final round. The first-place winners will take home $5,000 in scholarship money.

SAVE was developed by about 20 students with the aim of dissuading potential recruits to violence by employing the same social media tools—Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter—used by recruiting sites, but delivering a very different message. The campaign will feature messages about the harm extremist groups cause, the loss felt by parents of children who become extremists, and resources for those looking for help. The goal is not only to reach those who might be drawn to these extremist ideologies, but also to reach the people who are important to them—friends and family.

“We want to influence the influencers,” says Quigley (SED’87), who received a call in August from P2P asking if he was interested in entering his class this year. The answer was yes, although with some trepidation; he is not an expert on violent extremism. So, he teamed up with global terrorism expert Jessica Stern, a Pardee School of Global Studies professor. Stern says social media has become “a very important battleground,” for extremist efforts, one where the US government does not fight well.

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