 Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for coming today. My name is Bobby McKenzie. I am the director and senior fellow for the Muslim diaspora initiative. It's a new initiative that I founded about 60 days ago and it's an initiative that looks at Muslim communities in the United States through a non-security lens and so I was both intrigued and delighted when I was offered the opportunity to moderate this discussion in large part because I've spent the last five years working on a range of topics that are directly relevant to counter violent extremism and I offer this just to give you a sense of how my own ideas have been shaped and informed. I spent a year and a half out in Abu Dhabi setting up the Hadaia center which is an international center backed by 29 governments looking at the ways in which we can try and prevent counter violent extremism and in that capacity of setting up the center I traveled to over 15 capitals and met with senior officials and a couple of observations emerge from those travels and I one is that there are a lot of folks across the globe who are hyper competent and very concerned about Sunni violent extremism and that's great but many of their efforts are at very high-level meetings in places like New York and Geneva and here in DC and often missing from these conversations is what's happening at the local level. What's going on with Muslim community leaders and other faith-based groups. The second thing that I've noticed is that theoretically and on paper a lot of the ideas to counter violent extremism sound really smart and they are smart but when one moves from theory to practice there are problems analytically and programmatically and the third thing that I've picked up on and this is with my more recent work both the Brookings institution where I was before I came here and now in the last 60 days having visited six different cities across the country is that when I talk to Muslim community leaders in the US they say that we don't see a problem here at the local level with violent extremism we're not seeing a nexus in our particular neighborhood or our particular mosque a nexus between this place and violent extremism and yet the US government approaches us as if there is a real problem here and so I'm really delighted to have four speakers here today that are going to talk about some of these issues through the lens of how do we measure violent extremism and how do we think about countering violent extremism and I should note that some of my colleagues here are tracking across the country since 9-11 the number of deaths from individuals that could be labeled Sunni jihadists and the number is under 100 individuals that have been killed that's 102 many but if you compare that number to the number of deaths by white extremists it's about the same and before the Orlando attack the white extremist deaths were about twice as many but if you were to pull your average American they would presume that the numbers at the hands of Muslims you know deaths at the hands of Muslims would be skyrocket and this is in large part because not just this last political cycle where certainly we were in a toxic environment but in a post 9-11 environment there is palpable fear about Muslims in this country and this is really problematic because the fear doesn't match the actual threat so let me briefly introduce my four panelists and then I'm going to turn it over to them and they're going to have some really smart things to say no doubt I'm going to ask them a few questions and then I'm going to open it up to the audience I just ask when you have a question that you keep it to a question not a statement and I ask that you state your name and your affiliation so to my immediate left is J.M. Berger who's a fellow at the International Center for counterterrorism in the Hague and directly to his left is Ben Dubal who is a co-founder of O'Mellis and next to Ben is Mohammed Frazier Rahim who is the executive director of North America Quilliam International and next to Mohammed is Jonathan Morgan who's the CEO of knowledge new knowledge founders data for democracy so I will as one aside here I hope not to put you under any pressure but if any of you have been following the news there's a few issues out there on the topic of Russia and my colleague and friend right here J.M. along with another dear friend of mine Clint Watts three and a half years ago said we're seeing some strange things out there and we're not sure what's going on but we're sure the Russians are meddling at a very local level in the US and so I'm I'm delighted to have J.M. talk about CVE but the truth is he is truly an expert on social media and the ways that social media can be used for good but also for ill so without any pressure let me turn it over to you to J.M. well thank you for having me and I have no pressure at all so I'm typically the CVE naysayer who gets invited to all the CVE events to talk about how much I hate it and that seems to be a pretty good career path for me as Bobby pointed out there are really a number of problems that have to do with not only with measurability but also with the types of activities that we classify under CVE so you know town leagues and town halls and soccer leagues is the joke that we usually is there's a lot of stuff that happens that is not really measurably correlatable to violent extremism and you know stuff that makes sense intuitively like people need better education and then they won't become violent extremists people if they have jobs they won't become violent extremists and you know none of this stuff really holds up over time and when you look at larger populations what you do find is that in some small populations you might be able to make a statement like that about the town or a region but overall a lot of the efforts that we make on violent extremism have been typically pretty ineffective because there are aimed at things that don't correlate to violent extremism and we don't have any mechanism to measure the success of the program so at the end of the program everybody passed themselves on the back because they got a bunch of people in education but that doesn't tell us anything about whether it reduced violent extremism so since I've been with ICCT in the Hague I've been working on really sort of outlining my objections in a more systematic form I've done two papers over the last year that really go to this one really proposes that you know the concept of deradicalization which is at the heart of a lot of CVE efforts is difficult to measure and difficult to accomplish but disengagement from violent extremism is something that could you potentially be measured and can potentially be accomplished so instead of trying to change what's inside somebody's head I'm sorry I keep kind of look down I seem to get a big volume boost instead of measuring what's inside somebody's head you measure what they do so this offers possibilities in a social media environment for instance you can track an audience you can see whether somebody is following ISIS as an example although I'll get to why that's problematic right now in a minute but you look at somebody following ISIS or al-Qaeda you can measure whether they're following people who are putting out al-Qaeda propaganda whether they stop following them whether they're retweeting their material whether they stop retweeting whether they're engaging with people who are in the organization whether they're not that's a measurable thing and so it makes more sense to target that engagement than to worry about what they're thinking at the same time you know I think that we all understand that it is important to to get at these dynamics to really you know it is important to understand what's going on in people's heads and maybe we can approach that problem the issue with that is that we don't have any kind of consensus about what extremism is or radicalization and we don't have any way to measure that stuff so the second paper that I did in the last year which is called extremist construction of identity is an effort to build a framework that you can start evaluating people's extremism and it defines extremism in a way that I think has not really been done before the definition is that you're an extremist if you believe that the health of your in-group the community you're in can only be maintained at the expense of an outgroup so you have to take action against somebody else in order for your community to be healthy if you can't separate those that negative action from the health of your community then you're extremist and then that gives us a basis to start evaluating how extremist something is and how people become extremists and there's a framework that I outline in the paper for that to just to touch on the Russian stuff before my introductory remarks are up there are a lot of different elements to that and one of them and one reason that I took an interest in this in the first place is that on social media Russian influence operations have been heavily focused at encouraging domestic extremism in countries outside of Russia so a lot of what they do is encouraging nationalist movements far-right movements racism anti-Muslim sentiment and they are able to pour large volumes of material into the social media ecosystem and it has an effect and then we're seeing that and we're seeing resurgent right-wing movements you know in the United States in Europe and they have demonstrable obvious ties to Russia for instance the Russians hold a conference in St. Petersburg every year for far-right leaders many American leaders have been there many European leaders have been there and they reinforce that with a great deal of social media activity deceptive social media activity designed to create what Jonathan and I were talking about this yesterday the appearance that consensus reality is is supports your views so it's one thing for you to believe in some kind of far-right idea or conspiracy theory it's another thing if you believe it and you think that a hundred other people or a thousand other people believe it too so that community creation combined with the messaging they do the type of messaging they do is really very specifically targeted to foster uncertainty under the framework that I just wrote about and so it's a big contributing factor to the problem that we have with violent extremism once you get outside of the ISIS lens hey hey I'm Ben I'm a founder of Omalas and at Omalas what we do is automate integrate and quantify the different approaches that exist right now to countering violent extremism I think we have a few slides up that show our platform we can present those and so it's a very prescient that or a good transition that J.M. was discussing tracking how many people are actually following these different accounts that are spreading ISIS propaganda other extremist propaganda and seeing the effect on the likelihood that they share it after being exposed to something because that's one of the things that our platform is trying to enable people to do so what you're looking at right now is from research that we conducted on propaganda spread by Hayat Teriyar Alsham which is the successor group to al-Qaeda in Syria and by a number of measures they're actually more prolific on social media right now than ISIS is and so what our platform enables users to do is to get some semblance of a scientific understanding of what makes their propaganda effective what pieces of their propaganda are effective and also how effective counter messaging is so in this example we found two groups of H.T. Hayat Teriyar Alsham or Hattash social media accounts a few under the name agency one news and a few under the name Iba agency and we monitored these groups for a couple weeks and found that their followers were sharing a similar amount of content that was actually created by Hattash and after running a counter narrative campaign we measured the change in likelihood that they were going to share it we have two very similar groups with only one of those groups do we actually provide a counter narrative and then we see whether that group is going to be less likely to share extremist content after seeing the counter narrative compared to a control group we go to the next slide we can see the results so the orange line here is the group that we actually served with the counter narrative and we were able to see that they actually became less likely to share that content after seeing the counter narrative and the overarching point of this is that with this platform with social media analytics where it is you can actually get some understanding not just of overall metrics but compare it to a control and narrow down and see what pieces of your counter messaging campaigns are actually effective in achieving a change in people's connection with these extremist groups so thanks for allowing me to participate I wanted to just start off to say that you know I am a recovering counter-terrorism analyst intelligence officer I just want to put that out there in the room work for the US government for a decade for the director of national intelligence and then obviously at the National Counter Terrorism Center so I want to just say that to start off the conversation that coming from my optic point in lens I saw counter-terrorism or CDE excuse me as part of the larger counter-terrorism toolkit I can say now that I have been out for about a year and a half two years now and working with communities particularly my role at Quilliam there there are real world issues taking place at the grass root level and dealing with young people who have been radicalized and so I wanted to bring this down a bit from the 50,000 foot level which we could certainly engage on and sure we'll have time to talk more about but what we are doing right now are working we are directly working with youth who have been radicalized there are young people in the Washington DC area and elsewhere that have been referred to us be a friend and family that have come to our attention and they range from urban young kids who are African-American who are Latino to white Americans who could be from Potomac and so the diversity of approaches the practical solutions in which we are working on to find tangible ways to engage are adaptive they are innovative they are constantly they're iterative as well to address mental health concerns to deal with the ideological aspect as well as well as just sort of the group think that's certainly emerging is on the scene that we're seeing in the contemporary context and so for us we're seeing it oftentimes a disconnect between the literature and practice you know the literature speaks to one thing there's a wealth you can go and do a lit review on a number of individuals and organizations that are looking at what are the appropriate responses to combatic treatment but then you have at a grass root level community level of finding and dealing with individuals who need surgical interventions that are really individually specific as well and so a lot of our work has been working on that sort of front and so the debate that we've seen in the sort of the popular discourse is that is there a causality between so the interventions that are that are being offered and then how do you measure up with often specific examples that really can tailor toward individuals as well so I will say that we're all experimenting we are as well as I have to deal with a youth tomorrow I'm trying to find out you know is this a mental health situation I need to bring in a psychiatrist and how do we deal with this how do you then look at sort of measuring if this will be successful in for example in Kenya will this be successful in Saudi Arabia and how do we find good practices that we all can collectively borrow from I don't use the terminology best practices because that uses the assumption that someone has found a solution last time I checked and when I turn on the news there was an attack taking place in Afghanistan just a couple days ago whether there are far right movements that are emerging or and let's use perhaps better terminology maybe the ethno-nationalists etc we have to find again real solutions to address a growing ever evolving dynamic that is keeping us all up at night I'll stop there and then I think we'll have more time so a few years ago maybe two and a half years ago now I got involved in kind of advising from the perspective of a kind of a data and technology practitioner the White House and the State Department about how to do CVE specifically with kind of online communities and that came out of because Jame and I had done some work together focused on ISIS specifically and that kind of led to this engagement and what became clear pretty quickly was that CVE is not an outcomes-based discipline as much as it might like to be it's a very output-driven discipline and that there's a lot of counter narrative production there's a lot of programming but no real sense of how to measure success because what is extremism and how would you measure less extremism whatever that means and so after that after that engagement at at new knowledge we went about trying to figure out like well okay what let's just let's try and give a kind of an easy definition of extremism one that we could actually do something with and that was just what's an extreme deviation from the mainstream on some vector and so you know you could be an extremist Justin Bieber fan or you could be an extremist in support of you know a radical ideology that could potentially devalue and that was right around the time when the alt-right was becoming sort of a popular popular in the news cycle and and so we looked at far right extremism as a kind of a proxy for extremism in general and to see whether or not we could identify communities where extremism was present and whether we could see their sort of trajectory over time and it turns out that if you analyze the language of extremist communities you can measure mathematically the difference between how they conceptualize certain ideas and the mainstream and then you can also measure everybody else kind of somewhere along that spectrum and so we were able to break down the kind of sort of broader you know maybe very conservative community on social media very conservative sort of US based community on social media and find pockets that were sort of more extremist than others and look at communities that have the concept of Judaism is sort of similar to socialism and homosexuality and some kind of epithet as opposed to being a religious descriptor and by we started applying that to different online communities we looked at Twitter we looked at the comments on Donald Trump's Facebook page and found that his supporters there were being sort of radicalized in a similar way and then we looked at the comment section on Breitbart news which is exactly what you would expect it to be and what's interesting is that the same technique of basically breaking down a community's language and looking at who's introducing kind of new novel extremist ideas into this community and who's successful at getting those ideas to propagate throughout the community at large if you start identifying those people across multiple communities it starts to look like somebody's doing it on purpose which also led us to investigating the same issue from the Russia perspective and and earlier this year we released some research that showed that right around April May June and July which I'm told is consistent with all publicly available signals of Russian influence so say my friends in the IC who can't comment on any privately understood signals of Russian influence that there's a that this is a real indicator if you can understand who is injecting ideas into communities that you can see who might be responsible for an influence operation so this relationship between Russia and the far-right extremist movement in the US is is not for nothing I think that there's actually a real interest it's not just propaganda and influence operations it's the sort of folks who they're targeting and the potential consequences of that targeting that we should all be I think pretty concerned about for your introductory remarks I just want to open up a question to all of you and it touches on what Jonathan talked about output versus outcomes and by that in terms of output there is a lot of output on this and for those of us on stage who have worked on these issues for some years now I mean this includes to what you were referencing I mean it's everything from after-school mentoring programs is CVE to soccer programs to use literacy and so on and so forth and so a lot of spaghetti is thrown at the wall to see what sticks but we have really no idea even measuring what's sticking and so I think that the three of you right I think it was JM Ben and Jonathan talked about online you know this social media ecosystem and how to try and identify what's going on but we also had Muhammad who talked about interventions where you can also measure to some degree what's going on so I just the question is as we look forward with this particular administration with any administration if we want to move away from this framework of output versus outcomes how do we start to get at this what would be a better way of thinking about one violent extremism and how do we counter whether it's online or using the kind of interventions that Muhammad touched on so I'll open up in any order so the thing about online is that over time it has proven to be an extremely accurate proxy for offline so the advantage of designing and implementing programs and approaches online and measuring them is that you can then take the lessons learned from that and put them into an offline context and take them to an intervention and so the window has kind of closed on doing this kind of work on ISIS the ISIS on social media problem despite the fact that you know we still have governments clamoring for action from social media companies in fact there's not much more social media companies can do at this point the big companies Twitter Facebook YouTube are very aggressively dealing with this problem and there's a there is a diminishing returns to any investment that they're going to put into suspending ISIS accounts at this point the ISIS accounts are warped their networks are warped at the result Tariah Al-Shan is much better at this point probably a good laboratory for us to sort of investigate what kinds of messages will work to encourage disengagement because they have much more robust presence online and it's probably due to their separation from al-Qaeda and attendant ambiguities the social media companies are not likely to crack down on them in the same way so there should be a fairly natural network that we can experiment with and sort of design messaging for and you know we can obviously do this on the on the alt-right and the far right but then you get into very highly political questions about who's paying for that research and whether it spills over into the mainstream so yeah so just to drive home your point about how really data star of this field is George Washington conducted a George Washington University conducted a meta study at the end of last year of every CVE program they found only five that collected empirical data about the results of those programs only one that showed a positive outcome and it was a basketball program in Melbourne Australia and the way they measure and it was between Jewish and Muslim youth the way they measured it was how likely somebody was to choose somebody from a different ethnic group for their basketball team so that's the extent of data that we have right now and I think you're going to run into a problem with a field that's just trying to figure out how to get its metrics about what really should be looked at for radicalization so I talked to so J.M. and I both talked about how likely they are to share to retweet something from an extremist site and at omelas we're actually developing a score that measures somebody's entire online profile how similar it is to known extremists but even that you know it's something we just came up with and I think the way to really address this is you need to try to provide as many metrics as possible and be as honest as possible and if one metric shows it's working and one doesn't you know they're always going to be huge incentives to only go with the one that works but it's really essential that we include as many metrics as possible that we look at this in as many different lenses as possible because the simple truth is we don't know which metric right now is best at measuring how somebody actually feels how likely somebody is actually is to commit an act of violence in the name of extremism. I mean this is to J.M.'s point about disengagement but also to your point about interventions rather than I'd like to hear from all of you but rather than and but let's start with Bahamut but rather than trying to go at the entire community to try and figure out who you know on the spectrum of extremism where they are if we've already identified people and I think the FBI said there's around a thousand why not have a intervention program I mean and I know that the government is still toying with this and we're doing this in one of these Tuesdays but I mean a full-on intervention program and see how that works and the intervention program would be bespoke and tailored based on the needs of that particular individual but this idea of how do we identify who's going to go off the deep end I worry about that because all of a sudden we start to continue down the path that we're currently on which is the law enforcement and the FBI doing community engagements across the US like they've been doing since 2009 and by community engagements for those of you that aren't familiar the FBI and local law enforcement meet with Muslim communities across the country and from what I hear time and again across the country from Muslim community leaders is that they're not crazy about these programs but in many ways they feel compelled to participate and so I guess I would ask as a follow-up Muhammad with the intervention why not have a an actual policy where we focus on interventions and then we try and get me there would be some metrics around that though well I mean there are some programs that are already out there I've probably been familiar may not just sort of come on the radar in the past six months his parents to after hate the father of Carlos Fletso Abdul Malik Mujahid who carried out the attack in 2009 at the army recruiting site in Arkansas his father saw the aftermath of what do you do and there are other family members who are struggling you know is there 24-7 hotline who do you call you know you're not calling ghostbusters you need to call someone for assistance and so you have that you have the Montgomery County model of brave as another example so there are sort of onesie twosies as you mentioned I think to be frank with you this struggle of finding interventions that actually will stick is a big debate and then quite frankly we just focus on the Muslim community for a second because I think it's important to look at the broad spectrum there are internal debates within the Muslim community of and you've probably heard of is CDE something that should be done within the Muslim community is this something that is contrived by the US government is this an action that is part of a decades long plan of running subversive actions with Muslim population or minority population so you're having this sort of an internal debate between is this something practical that can be done and then is law enforcement the actual vehicle to do it as well the struggle is how do you get communities to address internal issues that are really some in many instances centuries old issues and confronting a challenge in a problem within that's that's part of it with a question though because what I hear from Muslim community across the US is that we're not seeing problems internally I mean when the individuals go off the rail and commit these horrible crimes we didn't know them I mean we didn't know they were on that particular path like Flint Michigan is one example that someone the FBI is looking for someone who apparently was an ISIS recruiter they believe and the Flint community is around 150 Muslims families up there I know them quite well and I went and met with them to talk about a full range of things they said you know we've had the FBI here we've had local law enforcement week after week after week this guy didn't participate in one community event with us and yet the focus isn't on any of the good we're doing to try and resolve the Flint water crisis the focus is on did we know that this guy was a sleeper cell we had no idea and so I guess what I'm hearing across the US from communities is that we're not seeing an internal problem and that the individuals who are going off the rail are often doing this online they're doing this in the privacy of their home and the basement or in very small groups so I guess that that's the perspective that I that I'm hearing and I think that that's a legitimate I mean I'm from these communities I am third generation African-American Muslim I went to Quranic school learn Arabic as a young child got fluent in Arabic and studied abroad all that sort of religious education and went to public school in the American South and the mosque that my father is the imam at is is integrated it's part of the fabric and largely speaking they have no issue but what happens when you have communities that or you have third spaces that are operating so not maybe within the mosque itself a third spaces that are taking place that unfortunately are corroding the good works of what the larger mainstream of the community is doing so that it's a struggle it's not a sort of black and white issue there is an internal challenge of the rise of this very skewed literate interpretation that's permeating in and in many communities not just in the US but globally and then you also have sort of private engagements with individuals are recruiting and trying to get people online and and what I would argue to say is the same way that a drug recruiter the same way that a gang recruiter seeks to target youth is the same way you want to address an extremist trying to target young people too as well and it's going to be different it's going to be complicated it's not going to be a one-size-fits-all all location as you know as you sort of highlighted already why are we doing this in the first place why do we care about extremism online in the first place it's not it's not we don't care about it just because we care about it because if it exists then people can discover it and people can discover it in the privacy of their own home and there's potential for them to self-radicalize we've been we've known about this potential issue for a long time and nevertheless we run around bothering imams and Muslim communities at Moss because we think that that's the only way to do this in the kind of the community engagement model that the FBI has been following since the 1970s when back to far-right extremists again and and I think that the it we don't stop to think about why we're doing this and we don't stop to think about what we can actually accomplish because I think in this context there's two paths to dealing with the online threat you can reduce the kind of operational capacity you can reduce somebody's presence which is largely what we've done with ISIS people aren't discovering ISIS content on Twitter anymore and getting led down like down the rabbit hole that doesn't happen because it's been largely wiped away but then the other thing that you could possibly do is engage with people and change their minds if you think that their ideology represents a threat to your well-being and that's something that ostensibly counter narratives are supposed to do but we have no way of measuring whether or not they're successful and so I feel like the fact that there is no clear strategy there's sort of no succinct tactical objectives to CVE in general is what leads to the situation that we're describing there you can identify individuals and perhaps engage with some kind of intervention strategy and everything else is is sort of the blind leading the blind to some extent some of our attitudes and policies about this are driven by what happened in the 80s and 90s so before the rise of social media you did have recruitment took place in last you did have people would go to Moss they would try and infiltrate their content and they would do it sometimes with with content that was not objectionable so you would be about Bosnia the proof we're going to go in and talk about Bosnia and then you use that talk about Bosnia to recruit somebody into into becoming a Mujahideen in Bosnia and since 9-11 the Muslim community is adapted and there is before 9-11 you know there was just kind of a very loose attitude about this in the same way the government's attitude is very loose the government knew that Americans were going to fight in Bosnia they didn't really care government knew Americans were going to fight in Afghanistan they they not only didn't care they kind of were in favor of it so you know what we've seen and what a lot of our program ideas and politics fail to account for is that there's just been dramatic change since 9-11 and that changes twofold one is that the community is adapted to an unavoidable problem so this was a problem you could be in denial about before 2000 and you can't be in denial about it anymore but secondly social media is fundamentally more conducive to extremists than operating in a real community is discovery of people with fringe views is far easier on social media you can have conversations with somebody who's violent extremists without putting yourself and you don't have to like hang around with somebody who's violent might be violent to you you can talk to them and get comfortable with them before before you have to interact with them and so the structure of social media really has given extremists an ability to do an end run around the gatekeepers that control the old media infrastructure you know before the biggest success that white nationalists had in the 1990s was getting a public access channel on cable that might have an audience of 5,000 people question about social media and uniqueness of it of bringing particularly extreme individuals together what kind of knowledge do we have about our ability to actually engage them and try and dissuade them from that particular path what metrics are there out there on this this is for all of you rather than just shutting down accounts but I mean our ability to actually engage I think that right now we're thinking about it from a very like CT counterterrorism point of view whereas what I what I see in general that most of this work is focused on identifying individuals like kind of NSA style let's collect everything that we possibly can and then in that in that huge haystack let's go and find these needles because these are real anomalies like anybody who would potentially engage in an act of violence based on being radicalized with some ideology is like it's so rare right as not is it's to be perhaps impossible to identify these folks individually so I think that a more realistic strategy is to think about group radicalization look at communities where there's a high degree of extremism generally speaking identify the people in those communities who are influential because they're the people who are already authentic incredible voices in this community that's at risk and can disseminate messages to the rest of the community in a way that will be heard and I think that that's that strategy of identifying those credible voices partnering with them on issues where there's some kind of some kind of shared values and encouraging them to encourage their communities to step away from the ledge seems more realistic to me than finding the 10 people on Twitter right now that are potentially at risk of committing an act of violence tracking them down and like direct messaging with them and you know as fast as we can to try and stop them from whatever they might do you know do we have any success though and engaging with these influencers to the degree you just mentioned that seems super hard to me because they're already down a particular path but they're not I think that's the thing that's interesting about this is that so often there's communities that are on a trajectory right and I think that there is there there are examples of identifying people that there are online examples of people who produce the amount of hate speech in a particular community because they faked an influencer in that community so there's sort of a there was a fantastic example recently of a couple researchers who looked at communities with a high degree of racism like racial epithets being used by members of their some online community some Twitter community and so every time somebody in the community would use a racial epithet they tested one account both fake accounts one fake account that had an avatar of a black person one fake account with an avatar of a white person and then they responded to the person who made the racial epithet and they said hey dude that's not cool we don't talk like that around here and the the fake account with the white avatar and a high follower count reduced the amount of kind of racially charged language in that community so it is it is possible to target people who are engaging in this behavior and say we basically before this gets out of control before this becomes a law enforcement issue when it's just people being jerks right or just people talking about things that make us uncomfortable let's see if we can let's see if we can diffuse that before it becomes an issue and so that there are examples of that being successful I think yeah I was actually gonna say that exact but yeah so you can sort of think of radicalization is almost like a sales funnel that it starts at this very high level where they're doing sort of a spray and pray a put approach trying to jump on to really popular hashtag see who responds feed them a little bit more propaganda make it as unobjectionable as possible at first then people show more and more interest then you get to more and more extremist propaganda and while that's obviously a problem that's occurring it does open up a huge opportunity because outside the world of countering violent extremism hundreds upon millions of dollars has been invested in going on social media and tracking it to understand how that sales funnel works advertising companies invest literally billions of dollars a year to understand how people interact with them on social media would make somebody become loyal to them on social media and because that technology exists we really can get a much deeper understanding of how that sales funnel is occurring what's actually causing people to go further down it what's actually causing people to turn away from it and that gives us the power to really start pushing back into really understand the radicalization process at a level we haven't before we just add two things to this I mean the first is the with the funnel the question is always where do you target the funnel so violent extremism is a game of very very low percentages so you know you send a message out to 50,000 people in the hopes that you get one person who's gonna adopt it and join the group with such low percentages there is a strong argument to be made I think that you target really target people who are way down the funnel after a lot of the people have been filtered out and secondly and this is related point one thing my the paper that I just did on identity construction looked at how Christian identity formed and one thing that became clear over looking at a century of their texts is that every time their legitimacy was challenged it forced them to come up with new and more elaborate justifications for their beliefs and so much of what we do in the cv e space today or or historically maybe we won't be doing anything going forward has been targeted to big audiences so we're gonna go out and talk to all Muslims about this problem and what we're doing frequently is we are framing this in the form of again this is historical much of our messaging has been devoted to saying that ISIS doesn't representative on ISIS it's not legitimately Islamic and the study of Christian identity suggests that attacking legitimacy is a sure way to escalate the justification so there are that it would you know what the research that I've been doing and I'll have a new paper out that applies this methodology to ISIS in the next couple of weeks is it may be better to undermine the arguments that they're making rather than do this head-on attack and you know I think that a lot of you have to measure which what your audience is right so when Obama comes out you know it says ISIS is not Islamic he's trying to reassure Muslims in this country that he's not out to get that's part of part of what he's doing so there's that message serves an audience for it serves a purpose for that audience but maybe it serves a counterproductive purpose for somebody who's in in the radicalization spiral thank you let me let me open it up now to the audience we're gonna have someone that's gonna pass around the microphone again please state your name your institutional affiliation and please keep it to a question let's start in the front hi Marian Baca Austrian public broadcast I've actually two questions one for you Mr. Rahim how do you reach out to these young people where do you find them and how do you I mean talk to them and what kind of your good practices are and to the social media experts have you ever done a study about the Donald I mean the subreddit the Donald and about the dynamics and there and maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that thank you answer your question you know the community itself I mean it's it's the old sort of neighborhood a friend a grandmother an aunt a cousin I'm on the board of the America's Islamic Heritage Museum that's in southeast Anacostia I would highly suggest you if you haven't been you should definitely visit there and I would you know it's it's community members who know who know me you know there are people who if they don't know me they they know they're looking for organizations that they can work with that are addressing front lines issues and we're not the only one there's others that are out there is what are doing really good work and then there's often sometimes there's the referral by by law enforcement too as well I mean that's that's one of many other approaches but I will say is that the issue is only growing it's increasing and you know just last night I had a family member of someone who I know who reached out asking for assistance again early on trying to they're not knowing what to do and so they're trying to reach out to organizations that it can at least address some of the some of the challenges that this young person is dealing with at the moment because I think this is fascinating when you said could you pass a little more specificity without sharing conferences but when they reach out to you what's a typical case look like you said a grandmother an auntie a cousin what what are you where are they coming to you with yeah I mean I think they listen I'm my background I'm a historian Islamic history African Middle Eastern history I studied classical Islamic studies in West Africa Timbuktu and Senegal the Middle East so the theological arguments I can work with myself oftentimes it's not theological it's there I there's the mental health issues that are road blocking me even trying to go point counterpoint based off of theological issues just like what my colleague mentioned earlier right that's that's necessarily not going to work what I will say is that you know there are there are there are there are other aspects that have to be addressed so you know the mental health issue is a big one right now that I think is something that we are addressing putting structures in place to deal with you know individuals ranging from autism to spits a friend of you as well I think it's a combination of all that it's people who are like I don't know what to do and I need to talk with someone and let me reach out to someone who I think knows what they're doing and so that's that's the first start I mean that's what you do want you want someone to like well in the worst-case scenario this may be this may be nothing at all but if it's nothing at all let me pass on to organizations that can't aid me to put together something a plan a structure a program that will address a very personalized experience as it so you know we're still experimenting I wanted to be very clear we're still experimenting as we're dealing with this because one person we're all different we're very much the same as humans but we're very different and how much you need to give how much involvement someone an individual may need more clinical assistance being evaluated and so we're dealing with it on a case by case and second part of her question maybe for the others my phone about the Donald if you're not not the Donald's our president but the Donald's a subreddit so if you're like fortunate enough not to be familiar with this particular subreddit it's it's pretty much just a so read it's a kind of a website where you can vote stories up or down whether or comments up or down pretty much it's whole it's whole thing and the Donald is a subreddit it's a particular community on Reddit that was sort of a gathering place for the alright and I think it's interesting to talk about it in in the context of how how ideas spread from one online community to another so what's interesting about the Donald is it was sort of like a meme factory it was like a like the minor leagues for memes kind of alt-right memes and so they'd sort of test out ideas and once they've kind of percolated their way to the top and became popular inside the Donald or the sort of means that you'd eventually see in more public spaces like Twitter and so I think the Donald's a more public one it's anybody can access the Donald and like most subreddits but there are also other channels where people are gathering in more private ways so there's a community called 4chan that you're probably maybe have heard of but hopefully have an experience in person there's a section of 4chan called poll slash poll only for the strong stomach but it's another place where it's sort of an ephemeral community the message is only last for short periods of time so people will gather there it's anonymous brainstorm ideas talk about sort of campaigns they want to run when the Macron leaks came out just before the French elections there was a group of people on 4chan gathering to decide how they wanted to promote those on other social media channels there's a platform called discord which is largely for gamers where people are gathering in sort of popular discord channels centipedes I think is the is the one that was sort of the alt-right kind of pro-trump channel and it's so the reason that the Donald is interesting is less so is like another example of like people posting swastikas and Pepe the frog memes but mostly because it's like it's a breeding ground for some of these ideas you can sort of see how some of these concepts are in separate so JMS earlier point about just having a whole new audience for extremism so on Reddit there's the front page which is every subreddit so every community within Reddit and any piece from any community can make its way there and because the Donald had that strategy of just going after memes you know you had people who may not have been interested at first just going on Reddit for any of the other reasons finding these inviting memes that they thought were funny and then going to that community at first just to share memes with their friends and makes it a much more accessible way to get there than say having to follow an extremist Twitter account that's going to lead you to and I think this is an example not so like we have more questions to get to I'm sure but I think the alt-right stuff is probably more accessible for most of us here in the US it's a little bit easier to understand intuitively why people get attracted to it but I think it's we went really deep on ISIS really deep into understanding the mechanics of their ideology and the sort of ideological underpinnings of the arguments that they were making what we're seeing with the alt-right if we want to call that synonymous which I don't think that it is because for lots of reasons obviously there's there's there's no like alt-right state so it's a totally it's you know it's a different thing but but many well okay maybe there is they were just more successful in infiltrating the mainstream there's so many like president Bannon jokes to make right now that I'm just gonna step right aside the but I think the reason that people get attracted to it is exactly that I mean there's just something iconoclast about the alt-right it's sort of anti the mainstream it takes all the things that you know as a young person you might find grating about the way that you're supposed to behave and it kind of gives them the middle finger and it gives you permission to be the way that probably most of us were as teenagers which is the way that adults do things is stupid and wrong and I think that that's a it's an attractive thing that is relatively speaking that kind of rebellion is innocuous and so the fact that that's a gateway to much more dangerous behaviors I think is probably something worth looking at when thinking about kind of extremism in general the target audience for most extremist young men cat USAID Afghanistan and Pakistan affairs I actually have a question for the group I think you know as we go forward with this narrative especially internationally development and diplomacy have really been asked to step out and play more of a role in countering violent extremism and we have for a while but especially as it pertains to development work I want to hear more about this kind of counter narrative because I think I think you know some of the issues that we've been having is our basic assumption anyway that that the narrative is that this has to do with grievances and if we solve those grievances then we solve terrorism or extremism from from I guess a lot of our work we struggle with what is that counter narrative because you really have to understand the situation in a localism to be able to inject that counter narrative so I would like to hear I guess a little more from the group of how you get to that counter narrative just briefly you know the terminology you know I think it's all about semantics and precision I mean we use the terminology the equilibrium inclusive narratives inclusivity being holistic addressing the localization right that is needed more than ever we've learned a lot since 9-11 I think we can't use the same terminology and language that's gotten us but so far and so at least starting off with inclusive narrative pushes against this idea of countering anything and instead being in a posture of sort of strength to say what is the real issue that our grievance base that are structural base that are theological perhaps that are ideological there are a number of factors and so I think that language just has to be addressed first and foremost and then number two addressing it at the local level I think you know throwing money out at a sort of broad brush global level just won't address what we're dealing with which we're seeing very different dynamics in different locations that are perhaps different even within countries themselves so my next two papers are are going to be on this subject and what I've been doing is taking the sort of the tools that we use to look at social networks meeting network graphs and applying them to narratives so a narrative can be understood as a series of concepts that are linked and so the next two papers that come out are analyzing Islamic State propaganda to look at their message and very broadly what I found was there are three kinds of groups that are discussed in in extremist propaganda there's the in group and the out group but the in group breaks into two parts when you get into so in the extremist Christian identity paper I looked at there was really no organization they weren't recruiting into an organization they're just selling a world view for ISIS because there is an organization you have two in groups you have the eligible in group which is Sunni Muslims and then you have the extremist in group which is ISIS and you can track the linkages in these narratives so the out group which in a lot of Islamic State propaganda she had Muslims although there's many they have many out groups but the out group causes a crisis is linked to a crisis and you can draw that as a graph and then the crisis is afflicting the eligible in group and the extremist in group has the solution to the crisis and so the eligible in group should join the extremist in group so when you take that very high level thing what you can then do is go into the message and I'm doing this with specific pieces of propaganda and get really really detailed about it to say so I look at a speech by Abu Muhammad al-Adnani and he very conveniently his rhetorical style makes this very easy because he likes to give lists so he like says here's what ISIS is and then he gives a list of qualities that ISIS has and here's what she is are and they here's a list of quality they have so you can map this out and what you can see is that some things that it promotes are just designed to burnish the appearance of the group so Islamic State is courageous which is one that are for some reason are institutional responsive terrorism automatically attacks that no there are cowards right but that these long stages courageous as a message that just in social networking terms and network graph terms it's appended it just hangs off there it doesn't go anywhere it's just enhancing the appearance of the group when they say the Islamic State protects Sunni Muslims in Iraq that is an appeal to the eligible in group and that's a messaging point that you should attack because it's bridging it's not just hanging out there and they put so much stuff out that it can be overwhelming and people just want to push back on every single piece of it but in reality what you want to do is you want to break the link it is you want to break the link that they make between the outgroup and the crisis and you want to break the link they make between the extremist in group and the eligible in group so you can go into their messaging and really very specifically identify what are we going to encounter program against my name is near answer and I'm from company called lower you do machine learning and AI so this sounds kind of depressing to be honest like okay are we losing the battle here but I have more question regarding domestic domestic issues so we all talk about Muslim communities and everything and my partner lives in King George which is like very white right neck and also black so but they don't mix they live together but they don't mix and when I go down there I'm actually very cautious to not come across as misinterpreted as a Middle Eastern whatever you know although I am from the Middle East but I try to be cautious because of ignorance so my question is that we're targeting the Islamic community Muslim community here we do so many programs for drug sex you know people who go into sex trafficking teenagers all the vulnerable ones right they not like no one she looks ugly someone comes and recruits her to become a you know porn and all that so similarly with with kids you know if I look Muslim and I'm in a King George high school where I made fun of because I wear a scarf because my parents forced me to wear a scarf or I have to fast or whatever so then I'm gonna get bullied because of my background how much how effective is really educating the parents so for science for my kid is gonna be a drug addict or my kid is gonna be a radical and also how important is it just like we're doing a lot of anti-bullying how important is it to really educate these kids because my partner who's African-American who's Christian doesn't understand why are Muslims well you know killing themselves and killing others and have to actually explain to him what is all and this is a guy who's kind of dating a Muslim person so you know so I mean can you imagine if I go to a redneck who's never been outside King George what his view of Muslims are you know education is important I mean that's I mean there I always make the distinction between culture and religion there's a lot of cultural dynamics that are going on that are outside of religious concepts that oftentimes get conflated into to that would be my quick short answer I think that you know critical thinking is important to as well I see one of my mentor one of the mentees that are here who works with me on some of the interventions to as well and we can say that you know critical thinking is at the core of some of the programs that we have on the horizon you know think about the Socratic method is Socratic dialogue you know there's this there's a concept one of the things we have going called to fuck or to think to ponder to reflect in Arabic that is a time-honored tradition that has gotten away but how can you bring secular concepts as well how can you bring good practices and other aspects of life not just religious sort of concepts and sort of synergizing the two I would say we have a big problem right now in that 30 to 35 percent of the American public is going to take efforts to encourage diversity and plurality as an attack on their politics and so to institutionalize programs to figure out how to get this message out is extremely difficult right now and it goes to the what I said before about attacking a legitimacy if they feel attacked they'll double down if you go into that you know redneck kind of county and start preaching to them about who they should be accepting of some of those people are going to get more radicalized by that rather than less so ultimately I think that you know first for a number of reasons this can't be a government function at least did not this government and secondly I think that probably the best solution is really interaction the more you meet people who are different from you the more you understand that they are people like you look the lady right in front of you I haven't heard much discussion of gender I'm kind of curious are there differences in terms of interventions or measures in terms of the attraction of or response to violence extremism for the record this is a very gendered panel here we did have Ben's colleague I was not able to make it so no go ahead then why don't you why don't you take the the gender issue since you stepped in for you know it's a it's a really good question and the focus really has largely been on men I mean so much of such a large percentage of the actual acts of violence are committed by men which is actually mirrors what you see in crime rates as well pretty closely as well as with age so it's a very solid question I really wish I had more details on what we were doing around gender but our focus has been perhaps too much on male at least from my side addressing there are organizations that are working on this one that I'm a big fan of it's sisters against violent extremism dr. either Schlaffer's worked on a lot of this that women are front lines of defense against extremism she's won the brand she's run a lot of programs particularly the mother's schools throughout the world and if you're doing work now in that exam Zabara just looking at women as being sort of advocates of turning young men away from extremism you just use the men but also I think she's doing some work on fathers too as well and working sort of that intersectionality I hate that word but we'll just use it for now between women and understanding some of the issues that they're dealing with as we're seeing shifts of tactics techniques and procedures by ISIS and Al Qaeda to employ women whether they're wearing a baya to just diversify the tech tactics you know just for the purpose of time so if you can maybe we can go the three individuals right there hi this is Jill Turner I'm from MSI you talk a lot about the counter narrative and these are either direct measures of programming in the counter narrative or their proxy measures for change in communities what other work is being out done out there about things like Kat said which is grievances relative deprivation or other things that kind of marry the you know the micro which is what you're doing in these communities with the macro which is what people are saying is there other work out there hi my name is Mustafa I'm from the Muslim Public Affairs Council I am a CV practitioner I wanted to know if you guys have any validated measures that I guess measure driving empirically found driving factors like identity crises like grievance etc and then finally the lady that had her hand here yeah I'm sorry were you talking about me I think no just in front of you I think thank you I thought to met a smell I'm the intern at the Washington Center so I was wondering what kind of reform is going on when it comes to FBI tactics especially within like when they're addressing these issues within the Muslim community because oftentimes Muslims you feel like they're being attacked when they come to the FBI with when they want to address these grievance or these issues in the community and they feel like there's children will probably never be seen again a lot get locked up in and these types of things are gonna happen to them after they you know put them to the FBI so what kind of actual reform is going on that's the first two questions I think are related you're talking about this kind of root causes stuff and I think that you know the issue is really that there are a lot of the root causes research suggests that the things we assume are root causes aren't so what I would suggest and this is an area that I'll be writing about in the future not not immediately but you know in a couple months or a year is that it's not any particular thing it's not joblessness it's not you know any any one factor education or you know there's a drug problem or a crime problem in the community it's when the status quo is changing dramatically in the community I think is when it is vulnerable to extremism creeping in and there's some really interesting research being done by researcher named Michael hogs published several papers on what he calls uncertainty identity theory and he suggests that people being uncertain about when you have uncertainty in your life and uncertainty about who you are whatever the cause of that and all this other stuff can cause uncertainty it's the uncertainty that makes you vulnerable to an extremist message because extremist promise to reduce uncertainty right I mean so there's no I mean that I think Jay makes a really good point that this idea that like if we could just solve joblessness or or whatever that we somehow solve the problem I think is true I think there's been a lot of really thoughtful research qualitative research done but I think to your point there's no no validated quantitative research I don't think along those lines and so it really is a combination of perhaps identity and then of course of course exposure if you're not exposed to extremism you're probably not going to invent it on your own the UK said it very well recently said it's you know all these things are things that depress your immune system but what you get exposed to determines what kind of you're gonna get sick and how you're gonna get sick first question I think we focused on counternarratives just because the topic is measurability and counternarratives lend themselves to easier measuring but you are actually talking backstage earlier about how basically everything and anything can be considered CVE mentioned earlier a basketball program was considered a CVE program and you see all sorts of community programs that you know would normally just be about building community resilience building stronger bonds between communities that can actually have some impact on countering violent extremism or you assume they would since the topic of this is measurability and I don't have any data to support that I'll just leave it at I hope that's the case on the FBI I would just say don't I wouldn't be optimistic about things getting better anytime soon there's no question that I mean since 2009 I mean the FBI has engaged across the country with a terms community outreach but to your point I mean this is what I'm hearing everywhere I go across the country is that we don't like this we don't want this but we also don't know how to push it off I think there's a lot of concern so I but James point yeah I don't think it's going away anytime soon can we take three more questions and this will be I think the final three maybe we can go the three gentlemen here just right here then rose two and three my name is Sean I'm from Xavier University and my question is in regarding to finding problematic propaganda do you guys use more of a linguistic tools or like contextual evidence like what do you guys use to like statistically map propaganda because you mean there's so many different layers of rhetoric so can you elaborate on that hey my name is Jared I'm here with the Washington Center I intern with faith and politics over on Capitol Hill my question relates to the term the alt-right that everyone discussed it was from what I gathered conflated with this under it's the underlining ology underlining ideology that incentivizes young people to radicalize so my question is who is the alt-right and where's the evidence that the alt-right is radicalizing people hi my name is Harrison Weeks and I'm another intern at the Washington Center so you mentioned earlier some of the stats on the differences between violent extremism crimes based on Islam and others based on sort of white nationalism in the United States so I just wanted to know if that's sort of proportion that's quite similar is present in Western Europe as well and if there are differences between the amount of violent extremist crimes which are based on Islam between the US and Europe if that's based on differences in CVE between and the international perspective how much is based on that and how much isn't so they're kind of related I think the sort of semantically how propaganda is identified and it also speaks to how we've quantified the alt-right's influence at least on the kind of larger conservative conversation so that ultimately with machine learning we can see we can sort of understand the implied definition of given concepts and words specific to some online community so if we look at all the language that a community's published we can sort of see how they define concepts right so there's like that's the way that we all learn concepts we sort of understand how everybody else talks about something and then we kind of figure out what it is based on like hearing it hundreds or thousands of times and so machines aren't quite that smart but if you look at examples of something millions of times and you start to get a sense of what it probably means and so once you can do that mathematically you can sort of see the trajectory of a definition of a concept and how that changes over time in a specific community and so if people have very uncommon definitions of certain concepts that's a sort of a key indicator of propaganda especially if there's a real spike if there's a real like big Delta and how that definition changes from month to month that's how we spotted sort of Russian influence operations in the spring and also how we measure the influence of the alt-right on the larger kind of conservative community over the course of the really over the course of 2016 in general so we looked at the way that the alt-right would describe a particular concept Judaism for example and then see whether or not that similar kind of definition of that concept was present in the kind of larger social media dialogue like how did that change what was the delta between the way that like regular conservative people talked about Judaism and how did that change and it became the concept of Judaism became increasingly synonymous with something more like an epithet with like some existential existential threat like globalism over the course of 2016 and so you could really see where the the alt-right maybe not intentionally but as a as a byproduct of their language or a by product of the language that was provided to them say by some outside actor Russia that they did have a lot of success and at least getting that particular idea to sort of spread throughout the adjacent communities there are Jason communities online a couple things on that I the way I find propaganda is community detection so you know you start with something that you know is propaganda that's kind of obvious in a way whether it's an ISIS video or something Richard Spencer video and then you see who's sharing it and then you analyze that community to see who's talking about it so when we have metrics that Jonathan and I designed for ISIS that have proved to be very effective for all kinds of communities not just extremists as far as radicalization of the alt-right I mean the alt-right is foundational in as much as you can say that it has a single foundational idea it's to be an umbrella group for a variety of mostly white nationalist nationalist and white nationalist organizations as such it is less potent than something like ISIS which has a very cohesive concept of identity and understanding of what they're doing it suffers the same problem that white nationalism has suffered in the United States for decades which is that it's a fractious divided group and they can't get together on something so what we're seeing right now in case like in Portland is that people who are you know using terms and making reference and viewing on social media stuff that's related to the alt-right we're seeing the low hanging for just people who are maybe already have mental issues who have some previous prior inclination to violence are sort of acting out the question is how is white nationalism and the alt-right going to evolve over the next couple of years and whether it's going to become a more we're seeing a split in the alt-right now right so we're seeing the racist alt-right sort of split off from the hyper-conservative alt-right and you know if they can go into a clearly defined identity and ideology that's when we really have to worry but in the meantime the fact that there are numerically so many more people involved with the alt-right as opposed to being involved with ISIS in the United States means that we're probably going to see increased incidence of violence connected to them even though they're less effective at radicalizing and mobilizing on the question about crime and the difference between here in Europe what I would say is you can take out a compass and draw a circle on a map concentric circles on a map around Iraq and Syria and the closer you get to the Iraq and Syria geographically the more involvement with ISIS networks you're going to see and when you cross the ocean to cross the Atlantic peanut States you see a drop off so as Jonathan correctly noted earlier violent extremism spreads through exposure through social contact and so if you you know where people live and where people move has an effect on how that spreads so closer you get to Iraq and Syria the more people are going to be involved in it so Europe is closer than the United States no we are just about to wrap things up but given that we're two blocks from the White House and we're in a think tank I would be remiss if I didn't ask each of you to close out with just one big suggestion or small suggestion and let's put maybe the current leadership aside for a minute as we talked about backstage there actually is quite a bit of diversity of thought on on the topic of CV within government what would you like to see this administration do differently from the Obama administration on the topic of CV if there's just one thing that you think and let's just start with Jonathan and move our way down I mean I think you know my stump speech on this during the Obama administration and it would continue if in the event that there's any interest from this administration about continuing CVE is to find an outcome just understand the number that you'd like to move and then orient your programming around that even if it's a small number even if that limits the programming like see if you can have an effect on something that we've all decided is meaningful that we can count and then if that's successful fantastic move on to the next number if it's not successful okay then maybe you can change your tactics and continue to pursue that objective and I think that that until we do that it's going to be really difficult you know I feel like conversations like this have been going on for years and I think we'll be here again in 2020 going like how could we start measuring the CV if we don't reorient ourselves along those lines I think aiding local communities as well as critical I mean communities themselves need to come up with solutions that are that are sustaining you know it's great to have government support initiatives but you know if the local population see that this is beneficial for them it's I see that as probably the most important item that I would highlight to the administration and those who are working in the policy circle at least for a short medium and long term yeah I mean the biggest thing again is measurement if you want the program to be successful you have to define what success looks like that definition has to relate to violent extremism and not to eyeballs or shares or likes so ultimately what I would say is that there are a lot of sacred horse things that that certainly in up until now have been beloved by policymakers in terms of town halls and soccer leagues and economic development and education programs and they are not supported by the science there is science available for this this doesn't have to be done intuitively we have research we can do more research to find real correlations and we need to let go of these aspirational optimistic if we make everybody's life a better place then there will be less extremism approach many many thanks to our panelists for coming please join me in giving them a very warm thank you