Tender for measuring the impact of disrupting online terrorist material

The Home Office is seeking to fund a number of small innovative research projects in order to measure the impact of disruption and removal of online terrorist content.

The internet has transformed the way that terrorist and extremist organisations can spread their message, influencing and radicalising individuals across borders. It enables groups such as Daesh to reach a global audience, with compelling and tailored messaging, exposing people to illegal and dangerous content.

Groups like Daesh are using the internet to inspire, radicalise, recruit and enable attack planning. We have also seen evidence of young and vulnerable people having online conversations with radicalisers who aim to take them into closed online spaces to discuss issues such as, how to prepare for and travel to Syria and how to carry out terrorist attacks in the UK.

Tackling terrorist and extremist content on the internet is vital in restricting access to and preventing the spread of propaganda and messaging. Government and police are undertaking a range of measures to tackle such content .

The Home Office would like to establish a stronger evidence base on the impact and effectiveness of activity undertaken to disrupt terrorist and extremist activity and influence online. In support of this we would like to invite expressions of interest from research partners to meet our aim of this tender – to measure the impact of disrupting or removing online terrorist material.

To help guide your thinking, there are a number of areas that we are interested in. This includes the short and long term impact disruption activity has on its:

• Availability/accessability (e.g. speed of reposting of content following takedown; ease of finding terrorist material)

• Reach and influence (e.g. viewership; number of social media followers; impact of the message and narrative; real world effect; effectiveness of content removal versus link removal)

• Quality (e.g. video / image quality; file size)

• Durability (e.g. the resilience and following of key accounts and networks promoting and disseminating extremist content)

• Location (e.g. diversification of platforms; shift to closed forums or dark web)

• Producers and disseminators (e.g. the frustration caused versus enhancement to their credibility; do individuals change the approach that they use for disseminating extremist content following disruption activity)

• Target audience (e.g. what is being said about online disruption activity on social media and online forums)

• Wider population (e.g. public attitudes to the role of Government with online disruption or takedowns)

We are also interested in understanding where disruption activity is most effective. For example, whether the removal of content from certain platforms or the removal of certain types of content are more effective than others. Also, the window of opportunity when a removal will have most impact before it is widely dessiminated.