Lydia Laurenson Polarisation and Peacebuilding Strategy on Digital Media Platforms: Current Strategies 3 2. The Institute on Strategic Dialogue: Reaching Violent Extremists with Video The Institute on Strategic Dialogue is a UK think tank that has been testing videos designed to convince violent extremists to leave their movements. Sometimes, these videos link extremists with emotional support afterwards. For example, in partnership with an organisation called ExitUSA, ISD helped former white supremacists in the US create videos about their disenchantment and post them on Youtube, with contact info at the end of each video. When white supremacists contacted ISD, each was put in contact with a former white supremacist who encouraged them to leave the movement. ISD summarised this pilot study and others in a 2016 white paper; one of their most interesting indicators of success was that eight white supremacists reached out to ExitUSA, asking for help leaving the movement. Not all ISD video initiatives include conversation with a human, but the ones that do are clearly similar to efforts by The Commons — both use digital scale to identify specific people with whom a meaningful intervention is possible. However, other initiatives simply create and distribute anti-extremist video. I spoke to ISD’s Zahed Amanullah, who said that in their outreach, they looked as carefully as they could and found only 1-2% of the population are in the desired audience for these anti-extremist videos. Of those, Amanullah said, only an extremely small number would be a threat. When targeting an audience, ISD narrows their scope based on people’s use of memes, terminology, etc. (Amanullah noted that they generally ignore race and “hope to be colorblind,” in the sense that other information about a person — like how the person uses memes — is more useful for identifying potentially violent extremists than their race.) ISD has now been tasked with figuring out a definition of extremism for the UK, because the country has a new commission for violent extremism. But, as Amanullah pointed out, “This is like answering the question of what is an acceptable level of environmental protection — it is arguably a question that society at large must answer, not any individual or any state. Perhaps at some point, there will be an equilibrium of discourse, where crossing the line is obviously extreme. But right now, everyone is testing that boundary — speaking in coded language that has meaning to some people, and so on.” Amanullah went on, “The scale and speed of the problem are overwhelming for everyone trying to address it. In the US, there is free speech as a modifier [to the culture]. In places with hate speech laws, such as Germany, where the law says that Facebook and Google have to take down extremist content when informed, those companies are trying to grasp the scale of the problem and make good decisions about what gets taken down. But everything is really fast-moving and there is not an official definition of extremist content.” 3. Moonshot CVE (and Google’s Redirect Method): Redirecting People who Search for Extremist Material Jigsaw, an R&D organisation within Alphabet (Google’s parent company), developed an open source methodology called Redirect Method after hosting a 2011 conference about violent