Thank you very much for having me at this conference. Thank you

very much for turning up. Before I start in earnest, I want to say a couple of things. The first is that everything you're going to see for the next half hour or 40 minutes is not only my work, it is the work of my team at ICSR. A lot of my colleagues have helped me do that, especially Shiraz Meha and Charlie Winter. The

third point is that if you don't like this slide, it's not going to get much more exciting. Don't wait for the fireworks. It ain't going to happen. The third point is that I'm going to take questions afterwards, and I

want to anticipate probably the first question, because what I'm going to focus on predominantly is ISIS and radicalisation. That's simply because I've been studying that for so many years. But a lot of the insights that

I'm going to convey to you, you can easily transfer to other kinds of radicalisation. So if you're particularly interested in, for example, how people become far-right extremists, then a lot of what is in this presentation, even though it doesn't deal directly with far-right extremism, is also relevant to you. And the fourth and final point before I start is that

me and my colleagues are not hackers. We're not spies. We're simply collecting open source information. We're collecting what other people reveal about themselves on the internet. In that sense, we are not experts. We are talented amateurs.

That's perhaps one of the first insights and myths radicalisation, about online radicalisation, and about how violent extremists operate on the internet. Because a lot of people believe that violent extremists online are incredibly sophisticated beyond belief, that they

are hackers, that they are experts, but in reality, they're people just like ourselves. They're talented amateurs, and in many respects, they use the internet just like most people use the internet. There are five points I want to quickly go through. The first is, I want to give you a very short history of

online jihadism. The second, I want to explain the ISIS online ecosystem, proving that ISIS online is not all ISIS, but that what ISIS gives its oomph online is coming a lot from people who are not formally affiliated with the organisation. The third point which is crucial

is that face-to-face interaction still matters. It's not all about online. I want to talk about the next steps, what is next for online radicalisation, and I want to conclude by saying or giving a few suggestions as to what I believe we can do. Before I start, five important points. The first point is perhaps the most

important one. The internet doesn't single-handedly cause people to become extremists or terrorists. In nearly 15 years of studying online extremism, I can tell you about maybe five cases of people who have single-handedly become transformed into terrorists

by being on the internet. It very rarely happens. The second point is also important. It is that, however, the internet has changed how people interact with people who are radicalised. Clearly, the internet has had a tremendous amount of influence on all of our lives, so it would be kind of strange if

it didn't also have an effect on how people become extremists. It did. If you think about how ISIS, for example, suddenly and very quickly attracted thousands of people from all across the world in 2013 and 2014, that would have hardly been conceivable 50

years ago. So, clearly, the internet has an effect, and I want to try to explain a little bit more about what kind of effect it is. Third point, what extremists do online isn't fundamentally different from what the rest of us do online. That's an important point, because I want to point out that terrorists or

terrorists aren't as exceptional as we always think they are. In the media, they are often portrayed almost as if they are people from Mars, but, in reality, of course, they are people in a way like us, and they are using the internet for exactly the same

purposes that all of us are using the internet for, which is to communicate, to create networks, to exchange information, and, of course, to convince other people of their ideas. The ideas, of course, are different. The content of what they are doing is different, but the ways that they interact with people are

not fundamentally different. Fourth point, censorship has not solved the problem, and has caused extremists to go elsewhere, and I will prove that. It may, in fact, temporarily help to disrupt their online activities, but it doesn't eliminate them.

People do not go away, do not cease to exist, just because you eliminate them from a particular platform. They will go somewhere else, and if you decide to do that, I'm not saying you shouldn't necessarily in some cases do that, if you decide to do that, you have to deal with

a trade-off. There are consequences to your actions. And that's my fifth and final point, and final argument, rather than focus on censorship, let's spend more time thinking about how to engage and challenge people online. The new word for that is counterspeech, or how to use their online presence to learn more about their

intentions and capabilities. So let's start with a very short history of online jihadism. Now, of course, it used to be all about websites. 15 years ago, you could find practically every violent extremist organisation, every important

preacher, every important figure online, they had some kind of websites, they were often being taken down. This, by the way, was the only website that Al Qaeda ever had, and only had it for about six months. But that's no longer true. Even in the late 1990s, early 2000s, a lot of activities shifted towards

forums, forums where people could meet, exchange information where they could chat. And, of course, one important consequence of that was that the rise of these forums made online jihad stable, self-sustaining, and, as a consequence, near impossible to take down. You could take down single

websites, but the forums of which there was not one or two, there were dozens of forums, they were all linked to each other, and even if the authorities managed to take down one, that site was quickly replaced and all the other forums would link to wherever that forum appeared again. In a way,

that's how the internet functions. That's what it was created for. It is difficult to take down, and precisely that function was also used by the supporters of jihadism. A second important development with the forums was that the message forums turned online jihad into a community.

It turned them from passive consumers of information on websites into people who could interact and find each other. And we know, of course, that with movements that have very few supporters that are very rare, and in some cases are illegal, it is hugely important that you have a place where you can connect to other people.

And we know, for example, from studies that have been carried out about right-wing extremists, how important that is, if you are a right-wing extremist in Nebraska, in the middle of nowhere somewhere, you may feel quite alone. But if you're connected to the forums, you suddenly feel, wow, there are a lot of

people like me. And that is precisely the effect that it has had. It created a community. They were the town squares of jihad online, and they weren't just talking about violence, they were speaking about all sorts of issues, religious issues, day-to-day issues, they were discussing the news, they were real communities, and for a long time

it was, you know, for a researcher, if you want, the most important thing was to have the passwords for these forums. If you'd lost access to these forums, you're basically in the dark. A third important development was that towards the mid-2000s, a lot more of the content

became available in English, and of course other European languages like French and German. And it was made to appeal to Western audiences. The first online magazine of Al-Qaeda was called Inspire, and it was not only radical and new because it was in English, but it was framed

in a way that it actually appealed to the habits of young people in Western countries. It contained instructions on how to build a bomb in the kitchen of your mum, what to wear for jihad, how to pack, et cetera, et cetera. If it wasn't about jihad, you were looking at that online magazine, you could have thought this was some sort of popular

magazine that you could have bought at a news agent around the corner. Omar Hamami was an early example of this. Omar Hamami was an American guy who came from Alabama, who radicalised and then travelled to Somalia. And in 2011-12, he

was the big sensation, because he was, as far as I know, the first jihadist who was on a frontline, who was a member of Al-Shabaab affiliated with Al-Qaeda, who was fighting with them, and who was live tweeting his experience. Now, I remember very well, five, six years ago,

how all my friends and colleagues were talking to him, did you see Omar Hamami? You could actually tweet at him, and he will tweet back even though he's in Somalia. Only a couple of years later, that had become the norm. But he was someone who was a pioneer in that regard. Another development that was important was, of course,

social media, and I'm putting this graph here because sometimes, half of these platforms don't exist anymore, right? But those were the platforms that jihadists were very consciously using, and it had an important effect, because everything that I talked about before, the forums and the

websites, they were tucked into a dark corner of the internet. Suddenly, by being able to be on YouTube and Facebook, the content that jihadists produced was suddenly available to much bigger audiences. You could literally stumble into jihadist content on YouTube, for example. What is often

forgotten about platforms like YouTube is not only that you could watch these jihadist videos, but that YouTube, like other social networks, actually also has a social function. So you can watch this video, and then you can actually get in touch with the person who posted the

video. You can also start communicating with people who've commented on that video. In the few cases where people have radicalised online entirely, the handful of cases that I mentioned at the beginning, that was indeed the case. People got in touch after watching YouTube

videos. The branding is centralised, and we see, of course, a lot of videos coming from organisations like ISIS which are very carefully crafted, which contain themes, which are super professionally produced, so the branding is centralised, but the volume of online

jihadism is grassroots-driven. So ISIS puts out three or four videos a day, but these videos are then translated, people produce memes, people produce cartoons, people tell stories about these videos, or they produce new videos using that content,

and that is being done not necessarily by ISIS centrally, it is being done by the grassroots, and it is that that gives online jihadism oomph. This is I think the penultimate development, the emergence of fighting communities. What I talked about in the case of

Omar Hamami, that he went to Somalia, fought with al-Shabaab and he tweeted from Somalia, is today the norm. We have literally, or we had literally hundreds of fighters of ISIS live tweeting from Syria, sending tweets like the ones you can see here,

we miss you in Iraq, US troops. I know only to speak good or remain silent, but sisters, I advise you that the muhadjirahs here aren't all under the correct circumstances. They are not a key there either. These are members of ISIS, supporters of ISIS, a lot of women in fact who are tweeting from Syria and trying to promote their cause and get in touch with other people.

And then the final development is the shift towards private messaging services that I will mention a little bit later on. That was a very short history of online messaging, and that is not a jihadism. And what some of you may have noticed is that there is nothing exceptional about this story. In fact, I told you the story of the

internet. First, there were websites, then there were forums, social media came along, then we had videos, private messaging services. And that reinforces my point that, in fact, jihadists are human too. Yes, they do terrible things, but the way they use the internet is not

hugely exceptional. They do the things that every one of us does on the internet. And, of course, whenever a new technology comes around, or a new opportunity to promote their cause, they are using that opportunity. So the history of online jihadism, broadly speaking, is the

history of the internet over the past 15 or 20 years. So what is the ISIS online ecosystem today? So, in 2014, some of my colleagues and I did something very clever, even though I say so myself. We looked at all the fighters whose data we had collected.

There were over 300 fighters in Syria and Iraq whose online social media profiles we had collected. And we looked at all their expressions of approval. We collected all their likes, their retweets, their mentions on Twitter, to find out who influences

them. Who is important for the fighters themselves? Who do they consider to be authorities? And what we found out was actually quite astonishing. For the fighters themselves, the most popular, the most influential Twitter accounts were of people who themselves weren't

actually affiliated with ISIS. By far, the most important and influential Twitter account in 2014 was this one. Shami Witness, 60,000 followers, almost all of the fighters in our sample followed him, sometimes received news about the conflict in which they themselves were fighting

from this guy. Who was this guy? Was he the leader of ISIS? Of course not. As it turned out, he was a 21-year-old computer science student in Bangalore, India, who had never been to Syria, and who had only read about Syria in the news. Yet what he tweeted

became so influential that for the ISIS fighter themselves, he became the principal source of information. That's what I mean when I say that the grassroots volume is driven not necessarily by ISIS, but by what we call so-called cheerleaders of ISIS

who are not necessarily formally affiliated with the group. The two most influential preachers for those 300-plus fighters in our sample were these two guys, Abu Musa Jibril and Abu Musa Serantonio, two individuals, again, who had never been to Syria

and who were not based in Syria. This guy, in fact, is based in Michigan, in the United States, and this guy is based in Australia. By now, a lot of them are offline. In fact, after we published our article, after we published our research, the guy from Australia

was complaining about us because he was arrested, and after he was released on bail, he gave an interview which he says the whole mess started last April when the International Study of My Center released its report. And he says something which is half right. He says, if you know them, there's just three guys in a basement in London. We're no longer in the

basement. We're more than three guys. But that's when his trouble started. He was an incredible influential guy for ISIS. He convinced a lot of people to go to Syria, but this is a guy who's never been a member of ISIS and who was based in Australia literally tens of thousands of miles away from

the battlefields of Syria. And that's what I mean by the ISIS online ecosystem. When we speak about ISIS online, let's forget for one moment about ISIS centrally and what they put out. That's important. But what really gives us a lot of dynamic are people like him who are very important and influential figure

even though they don't normally or formally belong to the organisation. Here's another important point about it, which is the importance and significance of face-to-face interaction. And here I should again point out this is really something that my colleague Shiraz Meir in London researched

very deeply. I give you just a couple of examples. This guy, his name is Iftikhar Jaman. He's from Portsmouth. He's from Portsmouth in the south of England. And he was one of the first fighters that we came across when we looked online. He's someone who went to

Syria in early 2013. And once he had arrived in Syria, and he was perhaps in the first wave of people who were going, he was tweeting very proactively. He was reaching out to people. And it seemed like he was recruiting a lot of people. This was one of literally

thousands of tweets that he had sent. The reason why I share so much is to show how it is the kittens, the landscape, hoping to make you see the beauty of it and come. And when he was talking to people, he often encouraged them to get directly in touch with them. He said, Skype me, please. Skype me, man. Get in touch

with me. DM me. And so if you were only looking at the online activity, if you were only looking at the Twitter account, the impression you got very easily was that here was a guy who was recruiting a lot of people via Twitter to come to Syria. But then we looked deeper

and we found out that, in fact, the people that joined him were not random people. They were all deeply connected to him. First of all, they were all from Portsmouth, the town that he came from. And secondly, they were all his friends. They were not only his friends, but they were actually active in the same

group, in the same Salafist group that he had been active in. The fact of this group of people that you see on the streets of Portsmouth, giving people the Quran and promoting them to, you know, encouraging them to join their Salafist group, two-thirds of them

ended up in Syria as a result of Iftikhar going first. In fact, if you start connecting the dots, and I will spare you the detail of that, but we've done this very extensively, you see that a very large number, probably two-thirds or more of the British fighters who went to Syria and joined

ISIS were connected to each other. They were not random people. People were not recruited online. Yes, they used the internet, but the people who actually took the risk to come to Syria and who succeeded in going there were very often in most cases people who had already known

each other. This is another example from a Swedish ISIS cell. You can see everyone was basically related to each other, not only because they were friends, but in many cases because they were part of the same family. The example from Wolfsburg is another person

who went to Syria in 2001. Here you have up to 20 who went to Syria, five people returning, 40 people supporters, and now of course all of these people were very active online, reaching out to people, trying to radicalise people, but the people who turned up were not random people. The people who turned up were exactly the people that you saw meeting in the Wolfsburg waffles on

Facebook. They were people who went to Berlin, met with other extremists, were connected via Facebook with them. We know that all the people who went had been closely friends with current fighters and that whenever people went, there was a big celebration. So think about this. If recruitment

of foreign fighters to Syria was all about online, why is it that we have clusters? Clusters in places like Wolfsburg, Zollingen, Mönchengladbach, Clusters in Portsmouth, Cardiff, Brighton. It's the same everywhere in Europe. You have these fairly small towns

and suddenly 30 people are going from that town. If it was only about the internet, that wouldn't make any sense at all because the internet is everywhere. These clusters exist because these people are very close to each other and they were close even before the first person started going. They played football with each other,

they went to school with each other, and they successively recruited their friends to go. Ultimately, what really makes the difference, what really decides whether someone is going to go to Syria is not some sort of tweet that you see online, it is a very strong and profound relationship of trust

that you have with someone that you've known for many years. And of course the internet plays an important role. The internet powers that and enables that, but it is not the internet that caused them to be radicalised. So what's next? What's happening? First of all, as a result of

online platforms like Twitter and Facebook basically kicking extremists offline, the extremists have not disappeared. They've gone to other platforms. So today, what Twitter was three years ago, Telegram is a much smaller platform than extremists today.

And that has positives and it has negatives. The positive is that Telegram is a much smaller platform, so extremists have a much smaller audience. The negative is that it is much more secretive, it is much more difficult to actually listen and follow these conversations. If you talk to anyone in the police

or in the security services today, the number one complaint is that they are not able to follow these people anymore because they are talking on highly encrypted apps. Whether you believe it or not, most European intelligence services are not able to hack into them. So, yes,

one of the consequences of kicking these people off mainstream platforms has been that they are now on more secretive platforms that are more difficult to listen to. It has positives and negatives, but one thing is for sure, these people haven't disappeared, and secondly,

it is not necessarily easier to deal with. A second important development has been the fact that a lot of the attacks that we have seen recently were so-called remote controlled attacks. This was the case for the attacks in Wurzburg and Ansbach last year

in Germany. Also, for example, for the attack on a policeman in Hanover by a 15-year-old Salafist in Hanover. They were attacks that were directed from Syria via private messaging services,

so the people who carried them out were actually getting instructions in real time on WhatsApp, on Telegram, on other platforms, and this has become more prominent, so much so that almost all of the recent attacks have followed that pattern. Again, it is very difficult to actually know what is going on

for police and intelligence services because quite often, they don't have access. One thing we haven't seen, but that may still happen, or some people say we have seen it, but there is a debate around it, is of course that extremists will livestream terror attacks on all the platforms

you know. Again, that shouldn't be a surprise because it is something that exists, and like I said before, the history of online jihadism is the history of the internet, and of course this function will be exploited by extremists as well. Let me conclude before I take your

questions with what we should do in my opinion. This brings me back to what I said at the beginning, which is that content removal doesn't necessarily cause extremists to go away. It causes them to go somewhere else. That may be positive in the sense that

for example on Telegram they have a smaller audience, but it may also have negative consequences. When policymakers talk about censorship, they shouldn't delude themselves into thinking that taking stuff online will make it disappear. It just goes somewhere else and there is a consequence.

It may have a disruptive effect, but it doesn't solve the problem. No single measure, no single action or method solves the problem. Content removal may in fact be justified in some cases, and useful, but it can never be the only solution.

It is equally important to use online content to learn about extremists and terrorist intentions and capabilities, and even more so, countering and challenging extremist narratives. However, we do not necessarily know a lot about what works and what doesn't, and that's

even though I'm in Germany and Facebook is almost as hated as terrible things, but I'm happy and proud to say that I've become a supporter of the online civil courage initiative which is in fact funded by Facebook which is precisely about trying to find out what works in

countering online hate and what doesn't work, and I believe we need to learn a lot more about that. That's in 30 minutes an idea of what happens when people get radicalised online. Let me make the first point last. The first point was

that people don't single-handedly get radicalised online. The number of cases where people have radicalised entirely through the internet is tiny, tiny, tiny. If you want to understand online radicalisation, then you have to understand what people are doing offline and what

they're doing online. Of course, the internet enables some of that, but it very rarely is the only reason for people becoming extremists. Thank you very much. Peter Neumann, what a great speech, but maybe we have

some room for discussion, so we planned a Q&A session afterwards, and we have two microphones on stage 1. There's the first microphone over there, and there's the second microphone over there, and if we have questions, please raise your hands so I can see your hands, and we can guide these helpful

ladies to you to have the microphone ready. Do we have questions from the audience right now? Okay, so first question's over there, so maybe you can introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Christian from Romania, and my question is a bit broader. Have you observed

jihadists posting messages not just for recruiting foot soldiers, but of a wider propagandistic variety, like to convince the

families of potential recruits to support ISIS and their activities? So, that's a very good question. Not everything that ISIS puts out in terms of propaganda is directed towards recruiting people. A lot of the

stuff that they put out is directed, for example, to branding what they do, so a lot of the videos that you see online will not necessarily be about fighting. They will not necessarily be about beheading people. Quite often, they are about describing the life in the caliphate,

describing how normal everything seems to be, day-to-day life. Look, we have a police force. Look, there are people cleaning the streets. It's very mundane content that is being put out with the aim of branding the organisation, but also conveying a sense of how normal everything is. My personal

theory about the most brutal videos, about the beheading videos, is that in many cases, they are not actually produced in order to recruit people. They are produced in order to scare you and everyone here in the room, and quite often, they are produced in a way that ISIS can be almost sure

that they are being shown on mainstream media in the West. I think mainstream media has gotten a lot cleverer about this and they are no longer showing these videos, but in 2014, when ISIS was starting to behead people making videos about it, you could switch on CNN and it was running 24-7. So ISIS uses these videos not so much to convince parents, but it

uses them as a method of warfare. It actually tries to produce an effect. It tries to terrorise us. And that's an important thing about terrorism that a lot of people quite often forget. Ultimately, the purpose of terrorism is not necessarily to kill a lot of people. The purpose of terrorism

is to terrorise. And you can terrorise an entire country, an entire population by posting a video of one person being killed and beheaded, and it has the same effect as if you kill maybe hundreds of people. ISIS understands that and very consciously uses media as a method

of warfare. I give you one more example because it's particularly telling. When ISIS took over a lot of territory in 2014, they took over Kurdish villages in Iraq. And what they did very cleverly, before they arrived in these villages,

they posted on social media pictures of beheadings, pictures of torture, they were tweeting and conveying a lot of ideas of what they were going to do with the people in that village once they were there. And the people

in that village consumed that information and they left even before ISIS arrived, so that when ISIS arrived, they didn't actually have to fight any more. They scared them into leaving. If you think about it, it's a really clever way of fighting a war, which is not

to fight the war at all. This is information warfare and I think that ISIS is better at it than, you know, the West or whoever is fighting them. We have two more questions, one in row number 12 and then in the second row and we will start in the 12th row. Hi, my name is Kat McLaughlin, thank you for that insightful speech.

I work as a content strategist, so I found everything you said very relevant and interesting. And I was wondering, the term counter-speech and maybe a successful way to change a narrative that would be really interesting, do you know any examples of where actually it's been possible to do that?

I know of very limited examples but I tell you, when it comes to counter-speech, I'm the first critic, even though I promote it. I'm the first critic because I say the way we've gone about promoting counter-speech is actually

very antithetical to the way the internet works. The way that we've tried to promote counter-speech so far is top down. It is governments or it is social media giants like Facebook or Google trying to produce counter-speech

that somehow reaches people and changes their mind. But that's not how the internet works. That's not how the ISIS ecosystem works. If it was up to me and maybe someone listens and this idea is gaining traction, in my view, there should be a giant contest. I think that social media companies should give

money and they should do a giant contest and say to everyone, we're giving a prize of, it doesn't even have to be a lot of money, it can be an internship at Facebook or at Google. We give prizes to people who produce great videos or great media content ideas and I can guarantee

you there will be hundreds if not thousands of people who are at schools, who are studying, who have a lot of time on their hands but who are actually users of the internet trying to produce stuff and put it on the internet. If YouTube had a question of the week, if YouTube had a question of the week

and they said, this week the question is, what's wrong with ISIS? What's wrong with ISIS? I can guarantee you within seven days there would be 10,000 videos produced by people about that topic of which 80% would be absolutely terrible, 20% would be okay

and less than 1% would go viral. And that's already more than all government-sponsored initiatives and Facebook and YouTube-sponsored initiatives have actually achieved. A simple contest. You have to galvanise bottom-up action. That's how the internet works,

not by the government saying, ooh, we will now commission a social media company to produce something for 100,000 euros and then maybe in six months we have one video. You can have 50 videos in a week for nothing if you know how to galvanise bottom-up action.

That's, I think, how it will be produced. And once you have that, you can then actually find out what works and what doesn't work, because then you can actually track which ones of these videos appeal to what audiences, what works, what doesn't work, because right now we don't even have data because there's so little in that area. And so that's my plea.

I've given that speech everywhere. So far, no-one has listened to me. And I tell you why it is. It's because governments don't want to take the risk because people may produce crazy stuff, right? They may produce things that criticise the government, and that's not necessarily something that they want. So I hope someone will take

the initiative and think about how we can galvanise bottom-up action rather than trying to have a top-down approach towards this which, in my view, will never work because that's not the internet. I saw another question in the second row and then the sixth row, and we will have microphones for you. So this

is the next question, and then we'll have this question, this question, and this question. Hi, I'm Anja. I'm a journalist. Thank you for a presentation. I have one question. You said in the beginning that you are using open source information, and then you told us about websites, forums and stuff, and now you are telling us about Telegram,

which is encrypted. What kind of access do you have to read those chats? Do you get those protocols from lawyers, or what is the access? Maybe you share a secret. Very limited. And I tell you this. In 2000, there has been a real change. There was

I think a golden period in 2013 and 2014 when these guys had no idea what they were doing, and they were all in Syria and everything was open. And we were lucky in being the first ones to realise that, and we started following and downloading the content, also getting in touch with people and chatting them up on Skype,

on Facebook, and as more and more content has moved to Telegram, a lot of these opportunities have closed down. There are still some people from that earlier period that we are still in touch with. So these people help us find out stuff about what happens on Telegram, but we're not directly in Telegram.

So that's really, if you want, a period that has ended. And so they realise now that being so open about it was not necessarily a good idea. The question in row number six, please. Hello, I'm Eva from Beirut, and we're maybe too close to

whatever you're talking about, but I cannot help but have this conspiracy theory in my mind when you talk about the attack on the Kurds' villages and what happened three days before the first

election tour in France and Paris, like having this attack on the police officers at the Champs-Élysées, are they getting that strong? Are they really terrorising the whole world? Is there a kind of parallelism between these two actions? Do they really

have access to European activists acting upon political agenda affecting even elections in Europe? What's your opinion on that? Excellent question, because that again goes to my point which is that in a lot of talks that I give

people, you know, there's always this statistic, you know, like someone brings up and they think, oh, I'm so clever, more people die in bathtubs or fall from windows or something like that than die from acts of terrorism, and that's of course true, but it's also a profound

misunderstanding of what terrorism is. Terrorism is about terrorising people, and only two weeks ago, I was in Paris, in fact, and I was speaking to the head of prevention, terrorism prevention of the French government, and she said to me, the act of terrorism that had

in her experience the most profound effect on French people was not the attack on the Bataclan, it was not the attacks that killed a lot of people, the most profound attack was the beheading of the priest inside of the church in Normandy. That was filmed and that was promoted,

because that was something that a lot of French people found so profoundly shocking that it really changed their mind. That goes back again to the point that I was mentioning before that ISIS understands the psychology of terror better than any other organisation, and what they've also

proven is that they understand the fault lines within societies better than any other terrorist organisations. The reasons why they are attacking Shiite mosques in Saudi is because they know that that is the best way to create turmoil within that particular society,

and they know exactly that if you managed to incite a refugee in Germany to carry out a terrorist attack, that would have profound political consequences in this country, and that's why they are trying so hard. They understand the politics of every country in which they are

attacking, and they know that the only way they can achieve an effect is by polarising society through their terrorist attacks. In France, they almost succeeded. They didn't, thank God, but they knew exactly what they were doing, and I think they are trying to activate those fault lines within society. I don't think that's

a conspiracy. In some cases, they've actually said that very explicitly. I saw a couple of questions over there, so in the seventh row, please. Hello, I'm Simon Menna. I'm not really agreeing with you on that because you mentioned

before that what we found is more the way ISIS works is this developing system, it develops somehow, and it has a huge amount of output. And I noticed through my research, and maybe you noticed yourself as well, that

one and a half, two years ago, there was a drop in the amount of violence being shown in ISIS videos, and it kept going up again shortly after. And I think this could be read as research on their side, that they put out less and less

violent videos and get less and less traction, and so they realize, well, the videos that get the clicks from our audience and Western media is the violence. So it's not this planned thing. It develops, I would say, it's more an organic process where it's self-fulfilling

and self-enabling and improving in a way. I don't actually disagree with you. I think you're probably right. Even though, and that's the caveat, there are definitely strategic priorities that they are pursuing. And so three years ago,

for example, when they declared the caliphate, the priority for them was to convince people to come to the caliphate. So a lot of content in their propaganda was describing life in the caliphate. It was basically saying to people, don't believe what you hear in the Western media.

We are showing you street scenes from Raqqa or from Mosul and you can see life is normal here. People can eat dinner kebab. There is Nutella. People have normal jobs. You can come here, bring your family, and you can have a happy life in the utopia. That was a very important theme of ISIS videos

for a long time. But that's changed, of course. If you've listened to the speeches of the self-declared caliphate, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, he's no longer calling people to come to the caliphate. He's saying to Western supporters, stay where you are and fight against the unbeliever where

you are. And for that purpose, of course, it is much more useful to actually directly promote violence rather than showing them pictures of Raqqa and Mosul in the streets. So I do think there are strategic priorities that get reflected in the videos, but you're definitely right in

saying that sometimes supporters take these things and do their own things with it, and sometimes things become almost self-perpetuating and the priorities are shifting without being fully under ISIS's control. And I'm certainly the first one to say that

we shouldn't over-interpret some of the things that ISIS is doing because, as you say quite rightly, there's an entire ecosystem. There are a lot of people involved who are not necessarily formally affiliated with ISIS and they do their own things sometimes. I saw two more questions. One to the left and one in the second row to the right.

So maybe we start with the first row in here. No, the first row, sorry. We will have plenty of time for questions. Thank you. My name is Michael Richter. Thanks for this inspiring talk. In the beginning, you said something interesting. You said that... Only in the beginning. No, I'm sorry.

I liked the whole talk. I learned a lot. But in the beginning, you said that if you compare right-wing extremists with ISIS terrorists, they are pretty equal. So what is their motivation or what are the similarities between these two groups?

Well, in relation to online or overall? The motivation. So what motivates these young men and women too? Well, I think that's the one million dollar question and I think that we need

a little bit more time for that. But I want to give you one bit of information that I think is pretty important. What all forms of extremism, and I think that's important to listen to for everyone, what all forms of extremism have in common and this is something that a colleague of mine from Singapore

said to me and it really stuck with me. He said it to me some years ago. It's not particularly new or astonishing but it's true I think. What all forms of extremism have in common, what makes them extremism is that they are massive identity reduction exercises.

What extremism does to you is to say to you, Micah, you're not just German, you're a woman, you're a European, you're from whatever town. It says you don't have multiple identities. You're not many things. You're just one thing. You're an Aryan. You're a Muslim. Pick your form of extremism. And that

one form of identity is everything that defines you. And through that form of identity, you define everyone and everything else. You're not a Muslim, I cannot be your friend. You're a Muslim, what kind of Muslim? Okay, you're the right kind of Muslim, I can be your friend. You're reducing your entire complexity

as a human being to one thing. That's what extremism is. And that's what all extremists have in common and ultimately all propaganda and all persuasion, everything that extremists do to convince you to be on their side is directed

towards you buying into that idea that there's only one thing about you. The Nazis are doing that in exactly the same way the Jihadists are doing that. And that's ultimately what all forms of extremism have in common. In terms of online, I think you can see a lot of the mechanisms of recruitment and radicalisation are ultimately

very similar if not the same. But again, they are all basically aimed at massively reducing your identity. And that's why everyone who has multiple identities we should celebrate. You should celebrate that. It's a good thing, keep it. So I think we have time for two

more questions, two last questions. First from the third row and then your question over there. Hello, my name is Brian Missouri. I'm a blogger. Thank you very much. I have just two questions. Your research regarding Jihadist groups in the online sphere,

is there any clue about the different groups like Al-Qaeda and Daesh? Have they had different strategies and they are fighting each other? So how is it in their strategies? Are there different strategies towards the online recruitment and how they explain this kind of

fights? And the second question is how does the Islamic people react on that? Are there any strategies to, as you say, counter speech? So are there strategies or initiatives from the online sphere or grassroots or not? Why aren't there any

counter speeches? Thank you. Okay, on your first question, there are definitely differences and again you can perhaps overrate that. But in my observation, having followed the rise of ISIS over the past years, you can certainly see that ISIS

was the most aggressive group online. It was the first group that published stuff systematically in European languages, for example in English, French, German, appealing to Western audiences. And of course what ISIS had and the other groups didn't have

was this utopia, the so-called caliphate. It could actually show streets. It could actually show towns that were governed according to the rules that they were promoting. And it basically said to al-Qaeda, you losers, you know, you've never,

you've talked a lot about the caliphate, we've created it, here it is, you can come and join and live here, and you can bring your family, you can migrate, you can make hijra to the caliphate. So they had something very tangible to talk about in their propaganda, whereas the other groups didn't. There's also another difference, because ISIS

actually was very, its requirements were very low. It basically said the caliphate is open to anyone who agrees with our principle. Even if you converted to Islam yesterday, you can come to the caliphate. Even if you don't yet

know how to pray, you can come to the caliphate and we will teach you. Al-Qaeda and its Syrian affiliate, the al-Nusra Front, they were more demanding. They didn't accept everyone. In fact, me and my colleagues, we went to Turkish border towns in 2014 and we spoke to a lot

of people, including members of al-Nusra, and they said, when we accept someone, we want to have good references, we want that the person is really religious, that he's not a criminal, we want to see that he has some ability, that he can be useful for us, and a lot of people who turned up

with ISIS were actually turned down by al-Nusra. So they had different recruitment strategies, and al-Nusra was much more demanding in terms of the quality of people that they would accept. And you can see that very clearly. Also in the propaganda. A lot of the propaganda coming from ISIS

is almost like gangster-type propaganda. A lot of things that al-Nusra and al-Qaeda would fundamentally disagree with because they think it's basically dumbing down a very sophisticated theology from their point of view. So there are differences between these groups. On the counter-speech,

there is counter-speech coming from Muslim groups, and the counter-speech that comes from Muslim groups, unfortunately, is not very effective. And there are, I think, two main reasons for that. The first reason is that a lot of Muslim groups that engage in counter-speech, it's almost like your

dad wants to be successful on the internet. He doesn't know how to do it. He doesn't know how to engage young people online. A lot of content that is being put out by official Muslim organisations, it's kind of okay, but you can see how it's not very exciting and how a

17-year-old would not engage with that kind of content. The second point, and the second problem with a lot of counter-speech coming from Muslim organisations is that it is very theological, so they are arguing with the texts. They are saying what ISIS is saying is not actually properly Islamic, and here is the

explanation. Here is a 17-year-old explaining to you why the theology is not correct. And, of course, that's not why people join ISIS. They join ISIS because it's exciting, because it gives them strength and power, because it's an adventure, because they can fight for a cause,

because they can have weapons, because they go over there, they are no longer with their parents. Theology comes into it, but it's not the most important thing. And so I think a lot of the attempts to convince people purely with theology have failed because it's boring. And I think Muslim groups benefit

actually from the sort of tutorials that are being offered by Facebook, by Google, by other organisations, essentially teaching them how to produce an attractive video online. But there's not enough of that, I agree with you, but it's not because, not necessarily because they don't want to, it's often because they don't know how to.

We're almost running out of time, but we have time for one last question. So, thanks a lot. I'm Marcus, a journalist, and I would like to ask about the online de-radicalisation. You said that the radicalisation is mostly or mainly working via friends, via the

environment, so is it possible that the online de-radicalisation is not working at all? I think you will have, I mean, if I can give you one, perhaps, sort of, you know, tip, it is to look up an organisation, and I have to

confess, it was founded by a former student of mine, and it's now very successful. It's called Moonshot, and they do countering violent extremism online. It was a guy called Ross Brennan. And the first thing he will tell you is that it is very important to be active online, and that it is

possible to catch people online, but that once you have started a conversation with them online, you have to bring it offline. You have to use the internet as a means of getting in touch with people and establishing a first contact, but ultimately,

de-radicalisation will happen if you encounter that person face to face, just like radicalisation happens face to face. So use the internet to actually get in touch with these people, but don't expect that just by doing a chat with them, they will be de-radicalised. That's not as easy as that.

Thank you very much. Peter Neumann.