2 January/February 2019, Vol. 39, No. 1 RUSI Newsbrief detected automatically, and half were removed within two hours. The statistics are impressive, but the question remains as to whether content removal is effective in reducing the terrorist threat. There can be no doubt that terrorists invest a great deal of time and resources in propaganda. Indeed, propaganda is fundamental to terrorism–a tactic designed to create fear among an audience–by definition. It is no coincidence that the first wave of modern terrorism struck during an earlier information revolution in the 19th Century, when mass-market newspapers and expanding literacy gave terrorists a new medium to affect its audience. A century later, the growth of television gave terrorists an incentive to mount visually impressive ‘spectacular’attacks involving aircraft, international sporting events or high-rise buildings. The 9/11 attacks signalled the zenith of spectacular terrorism, at a time when satellite television dominated the media landscape in the Middle East. During this period, what efforts were made to counter terrorist use of mainstream media in the West were limited at best and counter-productive at worst: democratic governments came to recognise there was little they could d o to censor or control terrorist content. But those governments seem to see internet-based propaganda as more powerful, more dangerous, and more in need of regulation and control. So much so, in fact, that the UK government is trying to restrict access not only to the terrorists’ own channels, but also material hosted on the research website jihadology. net, stating that it is ‘reckless to publish terrorist propaganda online without safeguards to stop those vulnerable to radicalisation from seeing it’. As a result, what looks like a double standard has emerged. In February 2015, for example, Fox News in the US broadcast excerpts of one of the most notorious items of terrorist propaganda ever produced: the last moments of Moaz Al-Kasasbeh, a Jordanian fighter pilot captured by Daesh (also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS) who was held in a cage and burned to death. To this day, Fox News continues to host the entire 22-minute video on its website–content which would undoubtedly have been removed by YouTube or Facebook. Similarly, the murder of Lee Rigby on 22 March 2013 featured a remarkable and disturbing item of propaganda, in which one of the killers, Michael Adebolajo, with blood on his hands and holding what appears to be a murder weapon, allowed himself to be filmed by a bystander while he delivered a justification for Rigby’s murder. The resulting video was

Removal of terrorist content by YouTube, Facebook and Twitter dwarfs anything achieved by the Counter-Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU) at Scotland Yard, or the similar unit at Europol. Confusingly, the ISC appears to acknowledge this, when it notes that the 300,000 items removed by the CTIRU in nine years was matched by Twitter in just six months. Image courtesy of Wikimedia