Stern in CSM: Social Media and ISIS Recruitment
Jessica Stern, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, discussed the role of social media in the ISIS recruitment process during a recent interview.
Stern was quoted in a February 25, 2016 article in The Christian Science Monitor entitled “Should Social Media Founders Take ISIS Seriously?”
From the text of the article:
According to terrorism expert Jessica Stern, a research professor at Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies, IS recruiters do much of their initial work on social media platforms. Once they have a serious recruit, they move on to encrypted forms of messaging.
Although Dr. Stern says it is clear that IS recruiters will come right back online once their profiles have been taken down, the threats “suggest that [the campaign against IS accounts] matters to them.”
You can read the entire article here.
Jessica Stern’s main focus is on perpetrators of violence and the possible connections between trauma and terror. She has written on terrorist groups across religions and ideologies, among them neo-Nazis, Islamists, anarchists, and white supremacists. She has also written about counter-radicalization programs for both neo-Nazi and Islamist terrorists. She has been working with a team at Boston Children’s Hospital on the risk factors for violence among Somali-refugee youth. She is currently working on a study of Radovan Karadzic, indicted for war crimes in Bosnia.