Developing Industry Policies to Mitigate Terrorists’ Misuse of Social Media Platforms

Date of Conferral

2022

Degree

Ph.D.

School

Public Policy and Administration

Advisor

Gregory Campbell

Abstract

Radical Islamic militant groups, particularly Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS), have utilized social media platforms for networking, recruitment, fundraising, information gathering, training, and planning attacks. The problem was that social media platforms, particularly Facebook, Telegram, Twitter, and YouTube, were not equipped with industry policies to provide a standardized response to terrorist misuse of social media and encryption platforms. The present study was needed because the lack of a unified response system has increased corporate liability, threatened national security, and enabled terrorist growth globally. The purpose of this study was to develop industry policies based on existing corporate policies so that platforms can implement standardized responses to terrorist misuse. This study was developed within the framework of social movement theory (SMT). Two research questions addressed ways in which social media companies responded to the misuse of their platforms by terrorist groups, whether industry policies could be produced from existing platform responses to form standardized policies to the misuse of social media by terrorists. A qualitative multiple case design was used to collect, code, and analyze open-source data using NVivo. Six themes that emerged were government collaboration, new regulation, greater platform responsibility, content removal, consequences, and policy changes. Recommendations included building policies on the strengths of existing platform policies and on the groundwork of peer-reviewed literature and NGOs. Resulting policies could facilitate positive social change by providing a blueprint for newer platforms, contributing to government efforts, and disrupting terrorist misuse.

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