 We're very, very lucky today to have this young woman here beside me. Mora is a professor of international security in Dublin City University, and she is a coordinator of something called Voxpaul, an EU funded project on violent online political extremism. And we were saying to her downstairs that of all days for her to be here after what has happened over the last three days with regard to the internet and what is being laboured as cybercrime. We are lucky that today we have her here and you may want to ask some. In my view, there are some quite simple questions I have to ask about these things because I don't understand them terribly well, you know, how they get in to do the things they do. But she has participated in main research on terrorism and the internet, academic and media discourses on cyberterrorism, the functioning and effectiveness of violent political extremism online and violent online radicalism. She is really a major expert in this area and she's fascinating to listen to, I have to say in the short time that we had some time to talk downstairs. And what she's going to talk to us today about is the online strategy that's being used, the Islamic online strategy and the way it can grow and maybe contract and then come out again in a different form. So I know that the audience here looking around at it are all people who have a big interest in this and they will challenge you, I'd say, with some of their questions, but I know you'll be able to answer them. So yeah, like Nora said, I'm responsible for a project that's EU funded about violent online political extremism. Very often I guess people say terrorism and the internet. And that's what I'm going to talk about today, in fact. What I'm going to talk about is the so-called Islamic States online strategy. And in particular, I guess what I want to talk about first is, OK, what's what's the problem, if you like? So what's their purpose in terms of what they're doing online? And then I'll talk about I'm going to call them I.S. I'm going to call them Islamic State. People call them Daesh, they call them ISIL, they call them ISIS, they call them various other things. I'm going to say I.S. We can talk in the Q&A if anybody has questions or their own perspective on that. But yeah, so secondly, what I want to do is talk about so-called Islamic States. I.S. is online activity in particular at the kind of the height of their powers, if you like, in around 2014, 2015. And then I'll go on and I'll talk about what precisely they're up to now and what the state of play is right now as regards their online activity. And if I have some time, I also want to dig in a little bit into what's going on in terms of disruption of that online activity and say a few words about future trends. So in terms of what the problem is, well, we've done some work. Colleagues and I in Voxpal have done some work. We used both open source data on the one hand and some closed source data on the other hand, both of which analyses show that the internet, relatively unsurprisingly I think you'll agree, is playing a role in contemporary violent extremism and terrorism. And it's been playing an increasing role. So the more the internet becomes embedded in our everyday lives, the more the internet plays a role in just about everything that we do, including in the activities of violent extremists and terrorists. I think that's worth remembering, I think, in this regard, is that it's not just about what people term radicalisation. So I am going to focus today on radicalisation issues, but that's not the only function of the internet and social media in contemporary extremism and terrorism. So, for example, in our work, one of the things that we tried to do in our open source analysis was to disaggregate the various activities that people who were convicted of terrorism, what they had actually done online. And yes, some of them, the internet played a role in their radicalisation to greater or lesser extents, but for many of them they did other things online. For example, they did attack preparation online. They learned about different types of attacks online. They did sort of recon, if you like, online prior to attacks. So things that you might have had to do in a real-world setting previously, they just switched and used the internet for these purposes. But like I said, what I want to talk about today is Islamic State and really their sort of radicalisation content or their radicalisation activity on the internet. So this is this idea, the problem for policy makers and others, law enforcement, et cetera, is that many people believe that if you are exposed to a very large amount of violent extremist or terrorism content on the internet, and also if you begin to network around it and that kind of thing, that it is possible for people who do that, not everybody certainly, but for a small numbers of people who become really immersed in that scene to become violently radicalised as a result of that content consumption and that online networking around that content. And so for me, I guess I think that Islamic State, oh yes, certainly think that it's worth inputting fairly significant resources in terms of people and time and money into the production of this content, into encouraging its circulation, et cetera, and I guess the question would be, okay, why would they have done that? Well, they've probably done that because they have the feeling that it has good outcomes for them. In other words, that it is influencing to some people in ways that have worked to their advantage. And I think we can probably see that in terms of a couple of different things, number one, encouraging people from Europe and elsewhere in the Western world and indeed further a field to travel and to engage in the conflict in Iraq and Syria on their part for others to carry out attacks in their home countries or in third countries if they weren't in a position to travel. So the second thing that I wanted to talk about, like I said, is okay, so what precisely were they doing online in their heyday? And their online heyday I guess is around 2014, 2015. In June of 2014, they announced the establishment or in their terms, the re-establishment of their so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria. And that's when they begin to term themselves IS Islamic State. And at that time, like I say, they clearly had thought pretty long and hard about how they were going to use the internet in this endeavor. And what they began to do, like I say, 2014, at a high point in 2015, they were putting out a really high volume of content. So in mid 2015, it's been estimated that they were putting out somewhere between 800 and 1100 items of content a month. It was actually largely for people who are familiar with this, the photo montages. So that's the bulk of what they were putting out. But they would also produce a relatively large number of videos, monthly, also audio and also a whole variety of text content. So it was very high volume and it was diverse in terms of the types of content that was being produced and being disseminated. Also important is that it was being produced in multiple languages and it still is right up to the present time. The largest part of it is in Arabic language, but there's a whole multiplicity of other languages that are being used and that content is being produced in. So they produce official content in multiple languages and also you get fan communities online who translate a lot of this content into other more obscure languages. But their magazines, for example, that they produce and the one they're working on right now is called Rumiya, which is Rome in Arabic. It's been produced monthly since the end of 2016 and that's put out there not just in Arabic but in English, in Turkish, in Russian, in a host of other languages too. So it's high volume in 2014, 2015. It was very high volume. It was multiple languages and it was disseminated very widely by them across many different platforms. So they were never, despite what we might have, the idea that we might have obtained from media and whatnot, they were never just on Twitter or on Facebook or just reliant on the major social media platforms. They've always had a reliance and a multiplicity of different platforms. So, yes, the major platforms, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, et cetera, but also a whole host of more obscure platforms. In particular, an important note for quite some time has been an upload, a content upload platform called Just Paste It. The Internet Archive is another preferred platform of theirs and really a whole host of other online spaces have been used by them. In media very often, their content has been described as slick. That's the most commonly used term to describe the content that's been produced by IS. And that's really because of its very professional appearance. A lot of it has really quite professional production values associated with it. And, in particular, some of the videos are quite impressive as these things go, if you like. I guess ones that are worth commenting upon, well, there's numerous videos in 2015 that contained aerial drone footage. There's also, if people are familiar with the Al-Qasasbe video, so that's the video where the Jordanian fighter pilot, who was called Al-Qasasbe, is burned to death. That video is 22 minutes long. It's interesting to watch. You can watch to about 18 minutes without seeing the burning. But the interesting thing about that is the really professional appearance of the graphics in that video and the story that they're seeking to tell through the video and the animated graphics, et cetera. Another interesting one to look at is the John Cantley series of videos. John Cantley is a British journalist who was kidnapped by Islamic State, is being held by them, as far as we know, right up to the present time. And he did a series of videos, I guess, for them in inverted commas, in which he appears to be reporting from Mosul, from Raqqa, from various places that were held by Islamic State at the time when the videos were made. And the interesting thing about those is he is using what you might call a sort of a BBC accent. He's speaking in his BBC accent and reporting precisely as if he was reporting for a major Western outlet, but on the part of IS. And that's probably an opportune time to say something that's quite important. So a lot of the content that's been produced by IS over time and including in their heyday in 2014-2015 is footage from the conflict, is footage related to terrorism, et cetera. However, a not inconsiderable amount of that content has no sort of violence component whatsoever. In fact, quite a lot of their content, even up to the present time, but certainly in 2014-2015, was focused on framing their activity as the building of a state, so as a state building project. Their so-called caliphate, so portraying their so-called caliphate as a utopian state for Muslims that Muslims from all around the world should travel to and where they would find a place that was welcoming, et cetera. And they put an awful lot of effort into portraying that in their online content. The other thing to say about a lot of the content in 2014-2015 was that it was clear from a lot of it that the people who were producing it were quite in tune with online youth cultures. So actually a lot of the footage used in videos or in sort of memes or what have you that were produced and circulated are drawn from major Western movies, Hollywood movies, for example, also from computer games. So in particular Call of Duty is something that was drawn on quite a lot. There's a lot of cat pictures, so we know that ultimately the internet is about cats, and they did a lot of cat pictures. So you would see these young fellas with guns or grenades or what have you and a kitten, and there's some well-known ones with bunny rabbits and little fawns and this kind of thing also. There's a lot of selfies that were produced and circulated by them. So very in tune with what was going on with young people, what was going on online, so kind of an online youth culture. Again, it's relatively unsurprising because what we're talking about of course is a bunch of young people who are in touch with online youth culture. And then I have to say that very important in 2014-2015, from a radicalization perspective I think, was that people who engaged online with IS, it was possible at that time for you relatively easily to be in touch with fighters on the ground in Iraq and Syria, actual members of IS. And for example, young people in the UK and in other European countries certainly had the opportunity to be in touch with, for example, some of the UK fighters, French youth with French fighters, some of the Dutch with Dutch fighters, et cetera. And I don't think that that can should be underestimated in terms again of that kind of influencing activity and what have you. So basically, excuse me, so basically what you had as a result of all of what I've just described is that in 2014-2015, they really did have a strong, vibrant online community, in particular on Twitter but also on other major social media platforms like Facebook and elsewhere. So all told what they had, what they provided for people who were interested, individual users who had an interest, was this quite immersive online experience? You could spend all your time if you wished at that point interacting with and around IS content, et cetera. So what was the purpose, I guess, of all of this or what were the outcomes? Well, like I said, really what a lot of this content did, so this very high volume that they spread very widely in multiple languages, et cetera, what did it do? Well, it glamourized the Syria conflict, certainly, especially I would say suicide attacks or the fight more generally. It also, like I said, a lot of that content was exalting the virtues of the Islamic State, indeed portraying it as a utopia for Muslims, especially those in the West and elsewhere. They did two things, I guess, in particular. They said, if you are in a position to travel to Syria to their so-called caliphate, well then it was absolutely your duty to do so. That was the first thing that they said, and this is the so-called foreign fighter phenomenon. We know that various people from various Western countries, in particular some European countries, took up this call and travelled to Syria and to Iraq to join IS. But they said, if you can't do that, well then carry out an attack on our behalf in your home country or in some third country, and we also know that this appears to have had an impact also. And they did provide online practical instructions on how to carry out both those activities. So there was quite a lot of instruction online in 2014, 2015 about how precisely you could travel to Syria to go to Turkey, how to cross the border, what to bring with you, et cetera, et cetera. And then there is also online, right up to the present time, instructions. So if you can't travel and you want to carry out an attack in your home or a third country, well then here are some ideas about what kinds of an attack you should carry out, what the targets could be, et cetera. So basically I would say that there are two things that were really, really important here. None of this could really happen or it certainly could not have the level of successfulness that it's had in terms of an online violence strategy, if you like, without the conflict context. So there is a horrendous conflict ongoing in Syria and Iraq, and that's absolutely crucial obviously to this, as is the setting up of the so-called caliphate. So they had something to sell, it was something very specific, it has tangibility, it's real. And that was their state or their caliphate. But the technology context is, I think, important because once upon a time in the absence of social media, you could certainly try and sell your caliphate or what have you, but I don't think you would have the same level of successfulness. So really what they did was, they provided for people who were interested this immersive online experience where like I already mentioned in 2014, 2015, maybe even after, it was possible for people to be drawn into this online world, this online IS world, and to become even major players in that world through your online activity, and some of those people then decided that they would actually take real world actions of different varieties as I've described. That was then, this is now. So things are somewhat different at the present time and there is a real world aspect to the difference and there is an online aspect to the difference. So number one in terms of the real world, IS are under pressure in the physical world at the present time. There's conflict raging, it's a very hot conflict right now in Iraq and in Syria. They need more people to fight because they are under significant pressure in those territories. They have also lost an enormous amount of territory that was once held by them. What that means is that they have much fewer safe spaces if you like in which to do their media activity and their online content production and what have you. But also, their social media operators and producers, particularly people high up within the media portions of the organization have been directly targeted. The most prominent person who was killed was a guy called Alad Nani who was killed at the very end of August in 2016, but other people have clearly been targeted before and after and it was because of their involvement in precisely in this media activity. Their cyber infrastructures were also targeted, so in addition to actually targeted assassinations, if you like, there was also targeting of their critical infrastructures in various hacking activity and whatnot. So what you do get is a fairly significant decline in output, it begins around July, August 2016 and Charlie Winter has surmised that by the end of 2017 they were down in any given month about 36%. So in February 2017 they produced approximately 570 items of content, but you'll recall in approximately June of 2015 they were up at around, let's call it, up 900 items or thereabouts. So that's the real world kicking in in terms of the supply side issues, right? The actual production of the content, but there's also disruption taking place online also. So Twitter in particular have really engaged at a very high level in terms of disrupting IS on their platform. So at one time it was perfectly possible to go on to Twitter and very easily and very quickly find very large amounts of IS fan accounts and IS propaganda and what have you. That's really no longer the case. What you're seeing here is findings from an analysis that shows that approximately 80% of IS related Twitter accounts are taken down within 100 days. Now that may sound long, but actually an awful lot of them are taken down an awful lot faster than that. And in fact many, many really explicitly IS accounts. So for example, those that are tweeting links to official IS propaganda will be taken down generally in minutes, hours or days, not weeks or months at the present time. And this has really seriously impacted the community that I talked about. So what you'll see there on the bottom of the screen is how many, what's the average number of followers at the present time for an IS Twitter account? 14. And here's to give you an idea. What's the average number of followers for other jihadi accounts? So we were doing a comparison in this research between IS fan accounts and other jihadi accounts. So for example, those belonging to the Taliban or al-Shabaab or Haithari or al-Sham who are al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria. And you'll see that they're averaging a much higher number of followers even though they're under a small amount of disruption also. So like I said, what this basically means is that the community is gone, the community is all but gone from Twitter. And in particular the IS community is all but gone from Twitter. And an interesting way I think to illustrate this if you like is to show that, okay, on the left-hand side of your screen there what we're seeing is some typical screen names from 2014, 2015 and some typical avatar images, profile pictures that were used at that time. And for anybody who knew this scene, the IS online scene, this was a way to really easily and really quickly identify ideological fellow travellers online. These are really, really obvious signals to people who might have shared your views or what have you or to researchers obviously looking for data and whatnot. So the avatar images are of prominent people from within the Islamic State. So the one with the yellow background there for example is al-Baghdadi, the so-called Calaf. The third one over is al-Adnani, the media guy that I've been talking about. You see in the middle bottom there is the so-called IS flag, the black and white logo. And then the flag being held by green birds and green birds are often a symbol of martyrdoms associated with suicide attackers and that kind of thing. And then you see on the right of the screen what things look like right now. And basically what you have is these screen names that are meaningless. And these are generally screen names, a lot of them are sort of throwaway accounts that are just being used to throw URLs and links out there and leave them up for as long as possible, but generally only a really short time because Twitter delete these accounts really very fast. And then the avatar images again are the so-called Twitter egg or other very innocuous images. And you can't really maintain a community in the face of this level of disruption because you do need some way to signal to other people where you stand, et cetera. So the community is pretty much gone from Twitter at the present time. So where is the community now? Because it's not gone from the internet. This is an important thing to point out. So basically right now they're on Telegram. Probably nobody in the room, maybe some people here, but probably nobody in the room is familiar with Telegram. And so this is, yeah. This is an interesting one. So yeah, so Facebook I guess is about 2 billion users. Telegram has considerably less users. Having said that, they are growing all the time. It has considerably less users too than Twitter. It's growing and it's growing at quite a significant rate, but nonetheless it doesn't have the kind of, I guess brand awareness even that some of these other major social media outlets have. What it does have however is end-to-end encryption. And this is a thing that's very much focused upon in analyses, in media, et cetera. Also law enforcement agencies are quite concerned with this issue. And we can talk about this later, the role of direct messaging and so encrypted messaging, et cetera, in for example contemporary terrorist attacks in particular lone actor attacks. But one-on-one contacts don't work generally or wholly well for radicalization purposes. If you want to get your content out there really widely in order to influence or seek to influences as many people as possible, one-to-one contacts don't work. What you need is many-to-many or one-to-many contacts. And it is possible to do this on Telegram, but not as well as it was possible to do so on, for example, at Twitter, which is a much more public platform. Having said that, there are 5,000 member groups that is possible to join on Telegram. And it is very powerful in terms of you being able to upload very large files onto the platform itself, so into their cloud. When I said that Twitter was disrupting accounts, deleting accounts from their platform, it didn't only disrupt the Twitter sphere, as it were, it disrupted things much more widely because people generally link from Twitter to other online spaces because of the nature of Twitter. You only have 140 characters. So there will be a lot of linking from Twitter. And when Twitter deletes accounts, they're thereby deleting all the links to the other platforms. And the other platforms are often times content upload sites. They're not social media spaces per se. So you disrupt, if you see large parts of the network, when Twitter disrupts the accounts on Telegram, it's possible to upload all your content into their cloud. So unless Telegram deletes the actual groups and channels, the content stays there for the duration. Telegram are doing some disruption, so some deletion of accounts, but nothing to the extent of what Twitter and some of the other major social media platforms have been doing. Just in terms of finishing up, I guess, it's difficult to say where things are going here. And it's difficult to say for two reasons. Number one, things are very fast changing in the physical world around violent jihadism and the activities of IS in particular. But also the internet is a very, very fast changing realm. And so when you put those two things together, it's really a high level of difficulty to get it right, if you like, about what the future holds. I guess what I would say is two things. Number one is this. I do think that we will see a continuing role for these messaging applications, and that's for two reasons. Number one, they're increasingly used by all of us in the real world, thereby they will also be increasingly used by jihadis and other varieties of violent extremists. But also number two, we can see that they are being used for one-on-one contacts between, for example, IS operators, if you like, who are in Iraq and Syria and are using them to be in contact with people that they have on the ground in attacks, who are about to carry out attacks in various European countries and elsewhere. And then secondly, in terms of future trends, I've thought for some time that a live stream is a possibility. I think that live streaming, well, it's definitely the case, it's a fact that live streaming really took off in 2016. The use of Periscope, which is Twitter's live streaming capacity, and in particular, Facebook Live are things that really saw a massive increase. And in particular, are including in, if you like, various kind of violence events that took place, including large-scale violence events like the coup in Turkey, for example, and also small-scale violence events, so various sort of hate attacks and also, unfortunately, people committing suicide and this kind of thing. So all of those things have been live streamed in 2016 and 2017. There is some likelihood, I think, that some violent extremist or terrorist attack is likely to be live streamed at some point. And again, it just goes back to my point about, you know, violent extremists and terrorists, a lot of them are young people, they've grown up with the internet, they use the internet in similar ways to how other people use the internet, but in this particular violent extremism and terrorism context, we see a shift to social media on the part of IS and others because social media came to be the place to be, the place where or how you would do the internet. We see a shift to messaging apps for the same reason. So these are structural factors, if you like. And so for that reason, I think live streaming, if it continues to take off and to build in the way that it has, is likely to be used. We can talk about that maybe in some more detail in the Q&A if people are interested in that. But those are the, I guess, the kind of things that we're talking about now. So if I was finishing up right now, I guess what I would say is this, that IS had their high point to date in terms of their online activity, probably in 2014, at 2015. They are under pressure now in the real world and in an online setting. With regard to online in particular, they're being disrupted by the major social media companies to a very considerable extent. They also have let, they're producing less content, so there's less content in circulation. If you're somebody who believes that accessing this content, consuming this content and networking around this content can be influencing and can cause young people in particular to become violently radicalized, well then the downturn in terms of production and the disruption by the social media companies is a positive thing. But they haven't given up. They know that their online activity had impacts in terms of their real world settings. And so while their community is gone from Twitter and from some other major social media platforms, what they are doing right now is sort of casting round for other lower level, more obscure online spaces and beginning to use those. So and there's always the possibility that they can sort of erupt online in some specific setting, like around some specific attack or what have you with a live stream or something similar. I'll leave it there.