Is kicking extremists off the networks effective or dangerous? This is what the experts say

By Matt Bradley and Mo Abbas - NBC News

When Jesse Morton saw how the United States Capitol was stormed, he recalled the deep faith he once had, not as a supporter of outgoing President Donald Trump, but as a propagandist for the ideology of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda.

Like some of Trump's most ardent supporters, Morton was also repudiated by social media companies such as YouTube, where he was one of Al Qaeda's most prolific English-language recruiters, offering him clues about the future they face.

"Much of what we see unfold in front of us now, with respect to the extreme right, I experienced directly, when the main threat that we were concerned about was the jihadists,

" he said last week from his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

[The head of Twitter defends the expulsion of Trump, saying it was for "security threats"]

Morton served nearly four years on terrorism-related charges in federal prison, where he assisted the FBI as an informant.

He then became a researcher for the Extremism Program at George Washington University and now works as an anti-extremism activist.

He was careful to point out that Trump and his followers are not Islamist terrorists mired in violent jihad, but he claimed his experience shows that taking down radicals works, if only up to a point.

Simply provoking a backlash from big tech companies and powerful law enforcement agencies can seem like a heady vindication, he said, and

removing pro-Trump leaders from social media certainly limits its reach

.

But for a smaller group of madmen, the censorship reinforces the same feelings of isolation, outrage and solidarity within the group that led to the radicalization, according to Morton.

[Twitter suspends Republican lawmaker Marjorie Taylor Greene's account for spreading false claims about the election]

Although his number of followers might decrease, Morton remembers that what you see is "real": "Those feelings of camaraderie, of community, of meaning and significance in the movement, as if you had an effect. And then you feel emboldened. you feel powerful, "he explained.

These countercurrents are confirmed in various statistical studies on the elimination of Islamist platforms.

Jesse Morton, a former propagandist of the Al Qaeda ideology, at George Washington University in Washington DC on September 9, 2016.Andrew Caballero-Reynolds / AFP via Getty Images

A 2015 report for the Brookings Institution think tank showed that even when Islamist extremists managed to log back into Twitter under different names, a strategy that tech companies have made more difficult, they tried to reestablish the number of followers they had. .

"It appears that the rate of account creation has lagged behind the rate of suspensions," wrote co-author JM Berger.

[Amazon, Apple and Google turn off the Parler app after the assault on the Capitol: it was the alternate megaphone of Trump supporters]

After the suspensions began in earnest in September 2014, the label of the Islamic State, or ISIS, fell from about 40,000 tweets a day to less than 5,000 in about five months.

"When we started doing this with the jihadists, people liked to say it was like hitting a mole, you know, where you just knock one down and another shows up," Berger recounted in a video call last week.

"The research that I have done and other subsequent ones show that this is not the case," he said.

Berger's analysis also backed up Morton's experience - that a cocktail of isolation and vindication risks accelerating the backlash from a small minority who struggled to move to more private platforms.

"He's just talking to people who echo the same views and talk obsessively about violence, anger and hatred, so there is a reasonable chance that being in that environment will radicalize you more," Berger said. 

Donald Trump publishes a recorded message on Twitter criticizing the capture of the Capitol

Jan. 14, 202100: 31

Morton recalled that such a toxic feedback loop could easily promote the notion that "there is no recourse other than violence as a result of not being able to express our ideas."

[The day the internet turned its back on Trump: how various platforms began to implement their user policies]

They agreed that Big Tech's attempts to curb right-wing extremists seemed more reactive than pre-emptive, and that

crafting a coherent set of rules around account suspensions would help companies undermine sentiment among members. censored groups that are being targeted

.

Morton and Berger also said there was a substantial difference between the displacement of jihadists and the displacement of far-right extremists - their support bases.

While jihadist recruiters in the United States have no substantial political backing, right-wing voters are legion, span multiple causes and ideologies, and can count on many elected officials to defend them.

After the election, Trump made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and targeted cities with a large proportion of black voters, who had come out in favor of Biden.

His attorneys unprovenly alleged a global conspiracy and filed dozens of lawsuits to overturn the election results, a legal strategy that failed in court after court without a single incident of voter fraud being proven in the complaints filed.

A survey by Quinnipiac University, located in Hamden, Connecticut, released on January 11, revealed that

73% of Republicans said they "believe there was widespread voter fraud"

during the November election, false accusations aggressively promoted by Trump but repeatedly rejected by the courts.

That will make dismantling far-right extremists much more delicate and potentially less effective, said Faiza Patel, co-director of the Freedom and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law.

"When we took down stories from Muslims, people didn't care," he said.

"However, when the accounts of prominent people are listed, people are going to care and the platforms are very aware of that dynamic," he added.