It Could Happen Here - The Problem of Deradicalization

Episode Date: October 12, 2021

Robert talks about deradicalizing far right extremists, a much more difficult problem than many self-appointed experts want to admit, with actual expert Alex Newhouse. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's terrible my me? This is It Could Happen Here,

a podcast about collapse, and that's appropriate because everyone's faith in me as a colleague has collapsed today as the result of a series of horrific clusterfucks on my part i'm late to the meeting i accidentally left the meeting when they started recording just a just a complete fucking shit show yeah speaking of shit shows my co-host garrison davis how are you garrison thank you i i'm the one that saved this i had to send the guest the Zoom call.

I know. I know. I'm not even supposed to be on this call. No, you're not. You're not even supposed to be working today. That's not true. Well, yeah. But you're not on this call.

Not on this call, but here I am saving the pod. This is enough witty banter. This is a daily podcast. Yeah. All right. And now let's bring on our guest for today monsignor alex newhouse alex how are you doing i'm doing well uh thanks for having me i feel like i was pulled in off the street just like bundled into a van and then yeah yeah we uh you know how people used to get

like shanghai like like captured by- Allegedly. Allegedly and forced to work on boats in San Francisco and whatnot? We do that with podcasts. That is actually most of what I've done to the people who work on your podcast. I think I've had everyone from your show on our show now, and it has been very much like I'm just pulling them on a string. Speaking of which, Alex, you are one of the hosts of the Terrorism is Bad podcast, a very controversially named podcast. And you work at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey Center of Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism. Center on, not of.

That would be a different center. Very important. Very important. Yeah. Middle word there. We're not bringing you on to talk about how to make explosively formed penetrators. center on not not of that would be a different center very important very important yeah middle word there and we're not we're not bringing you on to talk about how to make explosively formed penetrators not this no not this time that is someone else yeah but you and you are also a you are also a actual games journalist yes yeah i got my start in this weird space how do you a gamer gate how do you feel about ethics in the

game journalism industry alex uh it's always been fine like people lost their shit yeah yeah all right anyway that's the end of that yeah i do want to actually start there alex because you and i both have something in common which is that we we got our start writing in a field that's wildly different from consulting with like governments on terrorism like for me it was i wanted to write like dick jokes on the internet and i just like stumbled into a bunch of isis propaganda that most people weren't aware of and and that started me like lecturing at universities and shit and for you it was gamer gate so i'm interested in kind of you telling your story a little bit to start us off yeah so i was uh i was during undergrad i interned every summer at game spot uh video game website you may have heard of uh it's one of the two big ones along with ign um and when i was doing that i was so this was 2014 2015 2016 like right in the at

the beginning stages of ofamergate really popping off. And what ended up happening is a lot of the people I worked with, a lot of my colleagues and friends were just in the blast zone. They were just targeted by the absolute onslaught of harassment. And I just out of curiosity started looking into some of those people who were targeting my friends and colleagues, and it ended up being a lot of the people that we're still talking about today. Uh, you know, it all, all rolls back up to the Breitbart, uh, metropolitan area, if you will. Yeah.

And, um, I don't know what, uh, the thing that made me want to, I mean, obviously I've been aware if you work for a while, but the thing that made me want to specifically bring you on is you started on a new project to create like a video game that that will hopefully have an ability to help like de-radicalize people and i'm i'm not entirely certain like of the details of the project but i think it's a fascinating project because as as you know all too well a lot of this stuff started in gaming not as a result of anything specifically about gaming but the kind of like socialization that occurs in those spaces and the kind of like different communities. And it's been like we have going back to the 90s evidence of like different Nazi groups on the early internet, like talking about like these are specific, specific groups and subcultures that, you know, we'll have an easier time radicalizing and whatnot. But yeah, I'm interested in kind of what actually is going on with this project and how you think

it's going to look at this stage. I understand it's pretty early in development right now, so I'm not expecting an E3 walkthrough. Yeah, our E3 slice of life demo. I wish we had that. Yeah, we won a grant from DHS and FEMA, their terrorism prevention grant program this year. We just got awarded it literally two weeks ago,

so have not even started work on it at all but the project will be a collaboration between my center and a non-profit games development company called the i thrive foundation and basically what we are going to do is like build digital scenarios digital narratives that can be engaged with within classroom settings so we're targeting high schools for rolling this out and the idea is that we're going to give students the ability to take on roles that empower them to better understand how extremism and radicalization work as mechanisms uh which will hopefully the idea is that it will it will improve resilience and you know civil integrity and all those fun buzzwords within high school communities.

So we're not necessarily trying to de-radicalize already radicalized people, but we're really trying to build community awareness, community resilience to radicalization pathways. I mean, this is something I think about constantly because I get asked this a lot. You know, I'll get emailed questions from people, sometimes as much detail as like, hey, I'm like a teacher. And here's some things this kid in my class has said or something he put in an essay. And like, I'm growing really concerned about him. And like, I what do I do?

And my usual answer is, you know, there's a couple of people who I respect that I'll try to direct them to. But I don't I'm pretty good at how people get radicalized. It's something I spend a lot of time studying. I don't know how how you I have trouble figuring out how to break down these pathways because like, right, the default for a lot of people and for a lot of time has been, well, you de-platform them, right? You get them off of whatever. also you know the toothpaste tube effect the fact that when you you squash these popular areas where they're able to spread then they they filter off into increasingly isolated communities they develop new terms they find out ways to hide it and that actually increases you know it may it may reduce the number of people who get radicalized but the people who remain just get more and more extreme

because they're even more isolated from you know everyone else and i don't know how do you i don't how do you how do you break that derat that radicalization cycle like how do you how do you stop that shit before it gets you know to a tipping point yeah i mean in in general i'm with you i'm pretty skeptical of a lot of deradicalization strategies uh and it's it's like an incredibly difficult task to pull someone out who's already going down these pathways and then like you said it's also an incredibly difficult task to make sure that when you are disrupting the radicalization networks that they aren't just disappearing off to some other corner of the internet which we know they're doing like one

of the reasons why we're we're working with a video game video game company is over the last few years we've noticed a big migration into video game platforms especially big social based video game platforms like roblox and minecraft which are like not even remotely prepared to deal with you know very well-developed sophisticated radicalization networks they have moved over there uh both for organization and radicalization reasons um since mainstream companies have started taking more of an interest in deplatforming them and so we are ending up like pretty wildly unprepared for this sudden onslaught of extremists

being right in front of kids as they're playing games or you know teenagers or even young adults so our idea essentially is to use that language, the same language that extremists are trying to adopt via the structures of video games, via the sort of interactivity there to better communicate the impacts of extremism, what it looks like, how to identify it, and hopefully how to avoid falling into the traps that are laid for unsuspecting people. One of the issues, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, because we talk a lot about, like I think people have become increasingly aware of how bad Facebook in particular is as a problem with this. It's really what we owe a lot of the Boogaloo movement to.

And now this stuff is coming out about like the data Facebook has had on just, and this isn't, this isn't, this is adjacent to radicalization. Um, the mental impact that it's been having on teenagers, right? Like the, the, just how bad it is for people. And, um, I'm wondering like, how do you scale this stuff? I guess is the question. Like, how do you actually, how do you make the social internet less dangerous yeah i mean that's that's going to be extremely tough and we are even starting very very small like we're building we're building on a narrative platform to target three high schools right now um but the hope is that ultimately what we can do is build a tool set and and a platform like literally a game platform

that can be used by high school teachers and high school classes throughout the country or throughout the world. The idea will be to hopefully make a new sort of package of different methods and interactive experiences that can be reused into the future. But it is one of the big open questions that we will hopefully come to some sort of answer for throughout the project about how do we actually scale this up. But, you know, in general, it is, again, like one of the biggest open questions right now. One of the reasons why I'm so skeptical of a lot of DRAD and CVE techniques is they try to go for scale of effectiveness. to go for scale of effectiveness when in reality one of the best and only de-radicalization pathways that we know of involves people that you know and i know going out and meeting with these people

one-on-one and having intensive frequent communications with them so um there's as far as we know there's not a good answer right now this is a huge place of research right now because we just straight up do not understand how to scale up um yeah radicalization prevention and demadicalization i mean and what you know what you're trying to do in like reaching kids in high school in something that's meant they're meant to be consuming while they're in school is even such an additional challenge because i think you and i are both young enough to at least remember that like almost nothing that you put before kids in that context in a school gets through. I can think about like anti-drug programs and stuff when I was a kid and how ineffective

they were. There was, I had one effective anti-drug like speech by a teacher and it was just a teacher whose son was part of this, there was this one night in Plano where like six kids OD'd on heroin. There was a big Rolling Stone rolling stone article about it was a very famous moment and her son was one of the kids who nearly died and she was and she like just explained like physically what happened to him and begged us not to do heroin and that actually did stick with me i've never never shot up anything um but you know like the the a lot of it doesn't work i think part of why it's this thing i talked about when I tried to explain

like why ISIS propaganda was so effective. It's the, um, it feels more authentic than the, than the counter narrative, right? The counter narrative, cause it's, it's usually focused grouped. It's coming as the result of like some sort of government initiative, a bunch of people working together. It feels focused grouped as opposed to there's something inherently more compelling about something that just like feels like somebody who really gave a shit, cares a lot, put this thing together, even if it's terrible.

And I that strikes me as a really because if you're going to be scaling something and trying to reach a lot of people, it's going to have to be something that is put together at scale by an organization. And how do you I mean, I know this must be on your mind as you're trying to figure out how to craft this thing. I'm just interested in your thoughts on that really. Yeah. I mean, that exact challenge, challenge is what led us to proposing the project project that we are. So the idea behind it or the, the, uh, impetus behind what we do, what we proposed is, um, the exact problem of students just don't listen to people in whether that's anti-drug

programs or anything like that often my uh my uh feeling about it is they are often resistant to it because it's very negative it's very don't do this don't do this um setting up boundaries for for uh kids and adolescents to act within it's all very declaratory very you know commanding um there's no there's no sense of treating kids like people who have control who have interests who have motivations it's all attempting to restrict them and so the idea is that we're going to attempt to build a game platform that actually empowers students to operate within roles that have control that that have something to say to give them voices to give them uh that sort of feeling of being an established um person within a within a certain scenario um the way that i've

been thinking about it is that we're basically merging video games with like the structure of a model un conference or something like that um hopefully we'll be a little less nerdy than model un conferences but that's the idea of giving people power to make decisions uh and and treat them like actual you know operating humans yeah i uh i'm wondering do you have any kind of models that you're looking at when you think of like something that you see is is kind of worth i don't know emulating maybe the wrong word but like oh these people i think got it right and and this was effective like or is this really a situation where you feel like we're kind of in the fucking wilderness here there's not a lot of great models for what's effective we are very much in the wilderness yeah that was kind of what i was expecting you to say. Like so much of CVE and DRAD work over the last 10 years has been directly towards trying to essentially recreate the DARE model or the anti-drug model just in a different field.

builders and like model un and debate and like all these different models that seem to at least work to get kids engaged with like operating that sort of situation but it is going to be pretty i mean at least from what i understand it's going to be pretty new we're going to be out there really flying blind for a lot of it um but we will you know we have a pilot phase built in to try to beta test this with with um some of the students we're incorporating pilot phase built in to try to beta test this with some of the students. We're incorporating students and instructors in the actual creation development stage. So that'll be another hopefully good part of this. We'll give some students experience with the game development process, which I think will help engage them as well. Yeah, that strikes me as a particularly good idea.

And also just giving them some agency so it's not like this is a thing that you are forced to consume. This is a thing that you can learn something from. I think that's very important. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.

From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm interested in how you see how you see this, because, again, we kind of both got in around the same time. Gamergate is when I started paying attention to radicalization, too. How do you think it's changed since then? How do you think the nature of how particularly younger people are being radicalized has changed. I guess I'm also interested because I get the feeling that back then it was mostly younger people getting radicalized, and that's no longer the case. As we're talking, I just came across a video on Twitter of a group of anti-vax protesters chasing parents and children away from an elementary school and screaming at them that they're raping their kids with a vaccine. So clearly the problem has expanded.

Yeah, and honestly, one of the things that keeps me up at night is when we start if you know knock on wood we are able to roll this out to more schools we're going to run into some probably very resistant parents who have been heavily radicalized yeah um yeah i mean the big one is like what you said like the the radicalization demographics have vastly expanded uh to incorporate so many more different types of people so many more ages and even ethnicities and genders um but what we do know is that the hardcore of the of the violent extremists are still targeting adolescents um we know accelerationists for instance hang out and try to uh essentially blackpill a bunch of teens especially especially autistic teens, especially teens with mental health issues, and bring them into a more violent, more accelerationist posture.

So, I mean, I think that has sort of stayed constant throughout all of this. One of the big changes has been platforms. You know, 10 years ago, it was much easier for a neo-Nazi to operate openly on YouTube or Facebook. But that has thankfully changed. But they have spread out into, like I mentioned earlier, they've spread out into video games. They've spread out into other sorts of platforms where the social aspect isn't necessarily the first part of the platform, but rather a secondary aspect to it. And they try to engage adolescents on their own turf on, you know, in a Roblox game or in a, in a video game forum out there.

It's not even enough to say it feels like the task of reducing radicalization or not, not even mentioned pulling it it back just stopping the process feels not just like whack-a-mole but like whack-a-mole when you're surrounded by moles um and i guess that is the thing that keeps me up at night the most too is that like the problem has gotten because of how social media scales i think in large part has gotten so much worse than it ever was and the i see these crowds of adults you know assembling in you know places like los angeles uh showing up outside of schools to harass people and like i don't know what i don't know what to do about that like part of me thinks part of me thinks that the only effective long term answer is to mobilize a larger number of people to show up to, you know, not necessarily confront those people, but make them make them feel outnumbered and maybe they'll stop and that'll start a process where they they alter their thinking. Like I'm thinking kind of back to some aspects of the civil rights movement here, right, where you would have these people show up at schools to try to stop integration and whatnot.

And they would be opposed often by by larger groups that they would see the size of the marches in the street. And like, I don't know. I don't even know if it works that way anymore. If like knowing that, you know, 10 to 1 people think your stance on vaccines is stupid and they're willing to show up to like yell at you if that would do anything but i don't know what i don't know what's going to do like i guess i'm asking you like can you have you figured this out because i don't know what the fuck to do um but it's it's it's not you can't we can't close our obviously you're someone who's trying to confront it directly but we certainly can't keep ourselves like just pretend it's not going to get worse. Right. No, totally. And, you know, I often feel like it's almost too far gone.

And, you know, frequently I worry that we've already passed some sort of, you know, point of no return on radicalization, exploitation of social media but one of the other things i've also recognized is that when you're in a space that is dedicated to one type of confronting uh one one method of confronting extremism very often they will forget about or deprioritize or or even ignore the other types the other methods and one of the tasks before us i think before we throw up our hands and give up is trying to tie together all the different facets of resisting extremism from the the hardcore confrontational doxing and showing up in the streets counter protesting which i think is an essential part of it to um working as hard as we can to try to get tech companies to to realize what's going on uh and then also on the educational side like what we're doing with this

with this project um some of the things that make me at least a little bit optimistic is that there is obviously inertia both intentional and unintentional at tech companies but frankly they are still extremely far behind in understanding how to even do de-platforming on their platforms how to even identify who to de-platform like the majority of tech companies are still making content moderation decisions on a piece by piece basis specifically looking at content very few of them are doing actor analysis very few of them are doing social network analysis very few of them are looking at even the links between like off platform violence and on platform content. Like they are still very much in the stone ages when it comes to content moderation. Like what actually would reduce the harm that these platforms are doing at scale?

It's focusing on the actors and not just like the individual actors, which is part of it, but the patterns that let you tell whether or not someone is like that same actor who is kind of like putting on a different hat, so to speak. Are you aware of like is there any? Because I have not seen that happen yet. I haven't seen Facebook take that seriously. Um, and I have, I have spent some time there. Uh, I haven't seen, certainly haven't seen Twitter take that seriously. Um, I, I haven't really seen, I don't believe TikTok is like they're, they're, they're, they're just, um, like you said, they're going after, they're taking it on a piece by piece basis, which is never, there's too many pieces. That's never going to handle the problem. Yeah. I mean, TikTok is crawling right now. They are in their infancy. They don't have a data sharing, any sort of data sharing system set up for researchers or anything like that yet. I've seen optimistic signals. So I think Facebook's approach to QAnon and Boogaloo movement over the past year has been probably the best, the most positive development we've seen on the content moderation front because they took an actual network-based approach to it. It was hamstrung by a variety of different policy decisions, but it was still, from a mechanics standpoint, the most sophisticated one any of the companies has actually talked about openly.

And YouTube has followed in their path. They've started taking more network approaches. They've taken moderation action against QAnon on a similar basis. But the thing that I want tech companies to start looking at is applying a lot of the techniques they're using for disinformation and info ops work to extremism and radicalization it's very similar but right now it seems to be just easier politically or just they are further along with doing the large-scale network analysis approaches on disinfo um like twitter is doing a lot of that but it's all on information operations and yeah take info yeah as opposed to yeah people yeah and i uh i i worry too because i'm paying attention to kind of you know you have this whistleblower from facebook and how that's being politicized right

how the right is kind of going coming at this from a they're trying to say like as ben shapiro said they're trying to to um to censor uh alternative media voices and the like and i i worry tremendously about the politicization because number one it means that at best we've got like three years to get something together before you know who knows who's winds up in the white house next also, if it's just this thing of like veering between who gets paid attention to based on like what is politically viable for Facebook, we're never going to solve the problem. And I think I agree with you for the most part on the Facebook's response to the Boogaloo movement. I mean, I guess I think the problem was that by the time they developed a functional set of responses to it um it had metastasized it had grown it had grown strong

enough to exist on its own and a lot of people had gotten exposed welcome i'm dan thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you think is the actual, is reasonable to expect in terms of response time from these people? Because with Boogaloo stuff, it was about – I want to say about three months. Maybe – well, no. It was more like five.

It was about five months that it had from like December of 2019 was when I started really noticing it. is when I started really noticing it. And then like, you know, May at the, when stuff really kicked off of the George Floyd protest is when you started to see action taking the tail into May. Yeah. So I guess that I'm wondering like, what is the half-life of this shit? Like how quickly do you need to crack down on this stuff before it gets to be impossible to contain?

Yeah. I mean, that's the biggest limiting factor on the effectiveness of content moderation in general, but also in particular, these new approaches that the tech companies seem to be experimenting with. My understanding is that part of the... So I'm not defending Facebook by any stretch. I'm not here to be the Facebook rallying crew,

but my understanding is that they literally did develop an entirely separate approach to taking down the boogaloo movement so that explains at least a little bit of the delay but uh hopefully you know my optimistic side hopes that they'll be able to apply it more quickly in the future the problem is a lot of the network approaches that have been developed are have like these very high thresholds for attribution. So it has to be like a dedicated network that is cross the line into criminal activity and is actively calling for, you know, political violence on like a network level. And that like we all know that that is that is like the end goal or the end. Yeah.

And it's terminal at that exactly right like that is the terminal point of the development of these extremist networks so you know we're one of the one of the things that we're working on is trying to figure out a way to convince tech companies that you can and should take action earlier before it reaches that point uh and it's going to be a mosaic of things it's going to be combining violent extremism with hate speech with even like c-sam child exploitation stuff with um all you know criminal criminal conspiracy network policies all of those things need to be sort of thought of as pieces in a single big overarching umbrella that we can use to take down networks earlier on but you know it's a it's a that's one

of the biggest tasks is just convincing them to think about it much much earlier yeah um all right well let's i think most of what i wanted to get into today is there anything else you really wanted to like kind of talk about while you're here um those are the those are the big ones for sure uh we will hopefully have more to talk about very soon and how we're approaching this project um it's going to be a pretty big project and it'll take two years to to implement but um we're pretty excited to see what comes out of it yeah um well people can find you uh on twitter at it's just at Alex Newhouse, right? Alex B. Newhouse. Alex B. Newhouse, yeah. At Alex

B. Newhouse. They can check out where you work at at C-T-E-C-M-I-I-S. And yeah, I'm excited to see. Maybe we'll have you back on when you actually put out the game, but I'm really interested in looking at that. Oh yeah, what you back on when you actually put out the

game, but I'm really interested in looking at that. Oh yeah, what was the last thing you brewed? Oh, I brewed a red IPA and I'm currently brewing three gallons of apple cider. Oh nice. We just juiced ten gallons of apples and pears that I just kegged after almost four weeks of fermentation.

I've been looking at apple mills, like Apple presses. Yeah, I should I should just buy one. And we found one to rent. So it was just like, I don't know, 30 bucks for the day. And we just gathered up all the apples on property. But it's it was rad. Definitely very soothing.

Yeah, we were juicing all of the apples the day that Tiny got shot at that protest in Olympia. Tiny got shot at that protest in Olympia. So it was just like looking at the Twitter saying there's been a shooting at a protest and being like, yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. Yeah, I'm glad I'm not working today. Just having an idyllic afternoon pressing apples. This is a more enjoyable use of my time right now. All right. Well, Alex, thank you so much for being on.

Thank you for what you're doing. And thank you all for listening. Go with, you know, whoever, whatever, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.