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Students vs. Extremism
College students are on the front lines of battling terrorist recruitment online.
The U.S. government’s newest weapon in the fight against terrorism? It’s not a high-tech drone or an elite combat unit—it’s social-media-savvy college students. Countering extremism online is a priority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with groups like ISIS increasingly recruiting on the internet. In fact, hundreds of Americans are suspected of joining ISIS in recent years, and many of them were radicalized online. In a competition called Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism, DHS gave students at dozens of universities up to $2,000 to develop social media campaigns to counter online extremism. In July, DHS awarded students at the University of Maryland first place and funding for a project built around a video game and a social media campaign that helps young people recognize signs of radicalization. Could their efforts make a difference? Says Jibey Asthappan, a cybersecurity expert at the University of New Haven in Connecticut: “With extremist groups recruiting aggressively online, young people are now at the forefront of the struggle to get a counter-message out.”