海角大神

As governments struggle to blunt听the Islamic State's digital recruitment efforts, they are increasingly reaching out to technologists, social media firms, and advertisers to find creative ways to thwart the group's message of radical Islam.听

Appearing in Austin at the South by Southwest Interactive festival, President Obama met last Friday met with groups of technologists and filmmakers to discuss ideas for battling the IS (also referred to as ISIS or ISIL) message online, which includes thousands of听Twitter听听and sophisticated social media campaigns.听

"It's not enough if we're going to defeat ISIL just to take out their leadership or to control certain territories, if, in the virtual world, they are consistently reaching kids here in the United States or elsewhere in the world and recruiting them and twisting their minds to do terrible things," Mr. Obama said in a speech at SXSW. "We鈥檝e got to be able to penetrate that."

In one of the most recent examples of the militants' apparent success of using the Web to radicalize followers, it discovered pro-IS material on the laptop of a Muslim student who stabbed four people last November. Campus police shot and killed Faisal Mohammad, an American-born University of California, Merced, freshman, after he went on a stabbing rampage on campus.听

Now, as听the US government and European officials focus听on what social media companies can do to block extremist content, many digital advocates, tech experts, and civil liberty groups worry that an aggressive campaign against IS could also听endanger free speech.

"Placing private actors in the role of government and the role of arbiter of what speech is acceptable is a really dangerous game," said Rebecca MacKinnon, director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at New America Foundation, a nonpartisan Washington think-tank, who spoke on a panel at SXSW about what the tech community can do block extremist content on the Web.

Ms. MacKinnon said problems can arise if companies overcompensate and mistakenly censoring content from journalists and civil society members. "There鈥檚 no accountability," she said.

In January, a delegation of White House officials听traveled to Silicon Valley听to meet with tech executives about ways to fight IS online. Soon after, Twitter announced that听听125,000 accounts听听extremism, and a Google representative听UK parliamentarians that the Mountain View, Calif., company could tinker with its search algorithm to block IS searches. Britain has also established a police referral unit that allows law enforcement officials to flag听听content for removal.

But law enforcement and government officials can only go so far in censoring extremist content online, and even their best efforts cannot contain the powerful social media machine that IS has built over the years, say experts.听

Their videos present a "passionate narrative," said Shahed Amanullah, a former State Department official, who spoke alongside MacKinnon at SXSW. "Even when you watch the Arabic versions, you feel an energy out of it, it's a really primal thing."

Mr. Amanullah now runs Affinis Labs,听a Northern Virginia-based startup incubator that has proposed to fight IS by creating forums to empower Muslims to counter radical messages. In February, Affinis cohosted the ""听hackathon with Facebook and Google to that challenged participants to design social media campaigns that could counter online hate speech 鈥� including the IS message.听

"You can do an algorithm to fight child pornography, you can鈥檛 do an algorithm for ideology," said Amanullah. "It's silly to think that we can throw a technological solution at this problem."

Affinis aimed at countering extremism. One of them is called ,听a smartphone app that produces short videos about the Quran from mainstream Islamic scholars. Another project that emerged from a recent Affinis hackathon, dubbed Pentor, is designed to match young Muslims with mentors.

In many ways, said听Amanullah, the most lasting and effective way to fight IS online is if other Muslims can build platforms to combat extremism.

"The government is one node among millions," he said, "not some super node."

In fact, Amanullah said,听governments should resist endorsing grassroots efforts to counter IS because that support听could undermine the credibility of those voices.听"If you think it's such a great counter-message, get your filthy hands off of it."

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