ON THE CUTTING EDGE: SEO As A Counter-Terrorism Tool?
Britain’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism is training pro-West Islamic groups in white hat search engine manipulation “in an attempt to drown out extremist voices online,” reports online IT publication The Register:
The effectiveness of search engine optimisation in reducing traffic to extremist websites has been dismissed by academics however. In March, a report produced by the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) said young Muslims were much more likely to be directed to extremist material online by web forums and offline associates than by Google or other search engines.
"Tweaking the results for supposedly extremist terms would be largely ineffectual, not least because it is unlikely that any but the most callow wannabe terrorist would use a mainstream search engine to find banned material," the authors wrote. ICSR is a collaboration between British, American, Israeli and Jordanian universities.
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