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From academia to a tech startup: the unconventional journey of an anti-racism activist

Vidhya is a specialist of far-right extremism. She studied anthropology at Cornell University and migration at Oxford, before engaging in independent field research on white supremacist movements and the anti-migration sentiment. “I am an anti-racism activist”, Vidhya says with a smile — which might explain why she spent most of her life trying to understand and counter ideologies preaching hatred and advocating violence.

What first led her to engage with the field was a rather simple observation: Although an increasing number of programs are developed at various levels to tackle the issue of extremism — across the ideological spectrum — there are “few attempts to start conversations with the extremists themselves”.

A self-starter — to say the least — Vidhya went on to initiate this conversation herself, getting to know white supremacists in Scandinavia as an independent researcher. She got closer to these movements than a lot of academics who preceded her. And, rather oddly, “being a person of colour might have helped”, she says. The white extremists in front of her were so intrigued by her approach that they would progressively accept her presence in rallies and reunions, eventually opening up and telling her their personal stories, their feeling of injustice and what motivates their fight.

“Most of the time, their stories are based on real or perceived grievances”, Vidhya insists. They all have a “sense that they were somehow wronged, abandoned” and there is not a single but a constellation of factors — socioeconomic, psychological, ideational — that leads young men to join such movements. For Vidhya “identifying these factors and understanding the motives behind these individuals’ actions is the first step to tackle violent extremism”.

From top-down governmental initiatives to bottom-up independent programs: the reinvention of counter-radicalization

Vidhya met Ross Frenett, Moonshot CVE co-founder, while she was working at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD), a think tank dedicated to addressing the root causes of violent extremism. Although the ISD now clearly defines its mission as fighting the “grassroots of extremist violence” and calls itself a “global counter-terrorism organization”, its CVE programs are in reality quite recent, and Vidhya and Ross were instrumental in their developments.

In fact, only recently did governments, think tanks and non-governmental institutions start taking “soft” approaches to counter-terrorism seriously. To date, the dominant approach at the European level is to focus on the destruction and removal of content that ignites hatred online. These “hard” measures are now implemented at the EU-level through the Internet Referral Unit (IRU), cooperating with online service providers to flag and suppress violent online content.

But the efficiency of such measures in addressing the root causes of radicalization has been questioned by many. Not only do these only temporarily disrupt extremists’ online activities (instead of eliminating them), it also pushes them toward more private and encrypted messaging software such as Telegram or WhatsApp, which are way harder to break and to monitor.

These censorship policies also pose major human rights concerns: in fact, who defines what “extremist” content is? What are the unchecked biases behind such definitions? Does the massive and indiscriminate suppression of online content not violate freedom of speech?

Moonshot was founded in September 2015 as an answer to these crucial questions, and has grown exponentially ever since. The organization was, in the words of her founder, “able to fill a vacuum in the counter-terrorism sector”. Instead of a top-down approach based on hard and restrictive governmental measures, Moonshot works “as a for-profit, but independent organization”, which intervenes in the process of radicalization itself.

In that sense, Moonshot’s selling proposition is rather unique. Unlike many organizations developing and implementing CVE programs today, Moonshot has “CVE at its core” — and listening to its founder, this is precisely what enables it to pursue its mission effectively. Most importantly, Moonshot considers all kinds of extremism, which are believed to be “sides of the same coin”. In fact, although Islamist extremism became the first concern of governments after a succession of attacks in Europe, white supremacist groups are very active online and have also been proficient at spreading their messages creatively. Finding solutions to limit their online influence is as crucial as limiting ISIS’ recruitment capabilities.

As an independent organization, Moonshot can build innovative partnerships with a wide range of different actors which are all concerned by the issue of radicalization: Major technology companies such as Google and Facebook, but also local and national governments, law enforcement agencies, NGOs and civil society organizations.

Putting data scientists, marketing specialists and former counter-terrorism officials in the same room: the future of counter-radicalization?

Although it might be unexpected when knowing what Moonshot’s core business is about, Vidhya does not hesitate to describe her firm as a “startup based on the American West Coast model”. And, as many tech startups, Moonshot in fact impresses by the diversity of its team, both academically and professionally. The organization works with former law enforcement officers who were directly involved in counter-terrorism operations, but also marketing campaign specialists coming from the private sector, linguists, and of course data scientists.

In fact, technology is at the core of the vast majority of Moonshot’s methodologies. “Our foundational question was: Which institutions are capable of taking risks in the online space today?”, recalls Vidhya. Because of its unique position and staff, Moonshot can be very creative in how it counters online radicalization.

Doesn’t that involve some ethical challenges? Can we automate the search for, and monitoring of, “at-risk individuals”? “This is indeed a concern”, Vidhya acknowledges, “which is why each one of our campaigns has, at its heart, a deep understanding of the meaning and importance of the mission”. Besides, Moonshot’s modus operandi is always a “mixture of human and automated processes”. “Even what is automated is always a human-led process”, Vidhya assures. In other words, there are in fact “automated models of risk identification”, but there is always a human being in the loop.

Since its founding in 2015, Moonshot has been able to gather datasets about at-risk populations in 25 countries and currently deploys programs in 12 languages. An unprecedented scale for such operations. When asked about the potential ethical issues linked to the targeting of populations or individuals, Vidhya is very clear: “Moonshot is not an intelligence gathering agency”. Individuals or groups are not targeted through (or defined by) their affiliation with a particular social or ethnic group, but only “through the content they willingly shared in the online space”. As a result, most of the data that Moonshot works with is, in fact, publicly available. The part of the data that is private comes from conversations on Telegram. But issues of privacy are “always taken very seriously”.

When defining the mission of the organization, Vidhya talks about a “protective mission”, and sees Moonshot’s programs as “safe-guarding individuals” rather than surveilling them. However, this does not mean that Moonshot does not collaborate with law-enforcement agencies. Vidhya does share that Moonshot has “a relationship with the police on specific occasions”, but is not involved in any way in some kind of outsourced surveillance program.

Interestingly, Moonshot has recruited experienced counter-terrorist professionals directly coming from law enforcement, the most prominent being Dr. Craig McCann, who has over a decade of experience in counter terrorism and policing, notably having worked as part of the “Channel” programme,  the UK government’s multi-agency approach to identify and provide support to individuals who are at risk of being drawn into terrorism.

Maybe that is what the future of effective counter-radicalization will be made of: a deeply multi-disciplinary approach, spanning technology, academic research, marketing and counter-terrorism expertise.

Moonshot’s approach: engage, retain, and change behaviour

Moonshot’s mission has three main objectives: online interventions (direct messaging with at-risk populations), messaging and counter-messaging (redirect at-risk people through very targeted advertising strategies, displacing individuals’ attention to non-violent content), and capacity building (the offline component), to which should be added a research and development arm.

Although the term became widely used to describe similar initiatives, Vidhya does not like the idea of “counter-narratives”, which implies that there is one precise narrative that needs to be targeted and countered, and a one-way, coercive relationship. She prefers the positive term of “messaging”: the idea is to “make people engage with the content and ultimately make them think, to drop a certain amount of doubt”.

Does Moonshot think, then, that you can change someone’s mind with a video? “Yes”, says Vidhya, if you consider that how an individual acts in the online space is no different from his or her behaviour in real life”. For Vidhya, there is “no distinction between the online and offline when looking at individuals”: “What we do online defines us as much as what we do in real life, because today, getting involved on social media platforms is real life, and has real life consequences”. In line with this point of view, Moonshot also engages offline, through “real-life” de-radicalization programs, partnering with local partners.

But how do you, then, measure the effectiveness of the online part of the campaign? “A very good indicator of the success of a campaign is to compare the past and present online behaviour of specific individuals”, explains the founder. “This is what we call the Monitor and Evaluation (M&E) part of our job”. There is actually a “huge amount of data available, that, when used correctly, tells you a lot about the effectiveness of our strategies”.

There is, then, a “power to displace dangerous material to safer places” and to not only engage, but also “retain” at risk audiences and, eventually, effectively “change behaviour”.

Looking ahead

The future seems bright for Moonshot, as major tech companies increasingly manifest their interest in building innovative and long-term collaborations.

The best example is a recent partnership with Google’s geopolitical arm and tech incubator, Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas). Jigsaw came to Moonshot to test the Redirect Method that they had developed in-house. The startup is now in charge of deploying this methodology online and to define how the Google ad space is used.

The Redirect Method is at its heart a targeted advertising campaign: “The idea is to take these individuals who are vulnerable to ISIS’ recruitment propaganda and displace them towards content that convincingly refutes it”, explains Vidhya.

And the results are already there. In a recent blog post, Kent Walker, Google’s General Counsel, said that already in the first deployments of the method, “potential recruits have clicked through on the ads at an unusually high rate, and watched over half a million minutes of video content that debunks terrorist recruiting messages.”

Complex and innovative extremist propaganda requires a complex and innovative response, and Moonshot’s approach might well be part of the solution.

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