Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, as well as lawmakers, urged to prepare for foreign actors using US citizens to carry out violence

Social media companies and lawmakers have been urged to prepare for a looming type of extremism born from foreign actors mobilising US citizens to carry out violent acts in their homeland.

Speaking during a Senate committee hearing on extremist propaganda and social media, Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, warned of foreign countries using the kinds of persuasive techniques previously used to recruit Islamist terrorists to manipulate political discourse and mobilise unwitting Americans to attack specific targets.

Watts described this new type of threat as “Anwar Awlaki meets Pizzagate”, referring to the US-born jihadist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, credited with using social media to inspire terror attacks around the world, and the viral online conspiracy theory that led an armed man from North Carolina to discharge his weapon in a Washington pizza restaurant.

Instead of recruiting Americans to their own ideologies, foreign actors will instead focus on sowing division based on existing political issues within the United States, and manipulating individuals to the point where they take violent action.

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“The greatest concern moving forward might likely be a foreign intelligence service, posing as Americans on social media, infiltrating one or both political extremes in the US and then recruiting unwitting Americans to undertake violence against a target of the foreign power’s choosing,” said Watts in his testimony to the Senate’s commerce, science and transportation committee.

Alongside representatives from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, Watts faced questioning from the committee about tackling extremist propaganda such as that of Islamic State. However, the conversation frequently shifted to Russian influence operations, bots and fake news – issues that have dogged the social media platforms over the last couple of years.

The technology companies outlined the steps they had taken to police their networks for extremist content and recruitment. All three said they had allocated additional resources to identifying and removing extremist content, including implementing tools powered by artificial intelligence to automatically find and remove it. They highlighted previously reported measures including the creation of the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism.

However, Watts argued that they were being reactive rather than proactive to the threats they face.

“Social media companies realise the damage of these bad actors far too late, they race to implement policies that prevent the last information attack, but have yet to anticipate the next abuse of their social media platforms by emerging threats,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Clint Watts, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, criticised social media companies as reactive rather than proactive. Photograph: Win McNamee/Getty Images

To tackle these emerging threats, social media companies need to make more effort to verify users’ identity, clamp down on bots and hire threat intelligence specialists to prepare for new exploitation techniques and deliver more transparency around both political advertising.

In November, Facebook announced that it would alert users if they had interacted with a Facebook page or Instagram account created by the Internet Research Agency, a state-backed organisation based in St Petersburg that carries out online misinformation operations. During the hearing, Twitter’s Carlos Monje said his company would be doing the same.

Watts said that although the US government had made efforts to tackle the use of social media by terrorist organisations, its response to state-sponsored influence on Americans was “disjointed and perplexing”.

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“There’s been no response from the US government with regard to Russian influence campaigns on social media,” he said, referring to the techniques used in the run up to the 2016 US presidential election. “So they have stayed on course with their operations.”

The endgame is to create “widespread apathy in democracies” and dilute the lines between fact and fiction.

“When that happens you can’t keep a democracy moving forward. It’s about breaking our system and turning us against each other,” he said.

Russia has made attempts to influence elections not only in the United States but also in Europe and Latin America, and other regimes have adopted similar strategies.

“Everyone is adopting the technique,” Watts said. For example, Myanmar, where disinformation on Facebook masks deadly violence against the minority Rohingya population, and the Philippines, where President Rodrigo Duterte harnesses social media to silence political opponents.

“Lesser-educated populations around the world predominantly arriving in cyberspace via mobile phones will be particularly vulnerable to social media manipulations of terrorists and authoritarians,” Watts said.