Countering internet radicalisation

Why in news?

During the high-level meeting at the UN, India had made its remarks on preventing terrorist use of Internet and planed for an action plan.

What is Internet radicalisation?

• Internet is used by terrorist as an effective tool for radicalisation and terror financing.
• Terror groupsuse the internet to advocate the use of violence to further a religious, ideological or political cause.
• These terror group use different forms of material to encourage radicalisation towards violence.
• Such Extremist material can includearticles, images, speeches or videos that encourage hate or violence and websites created or hosted by terrorist organisations
• This material is affecting minority youths, whomay be vulnerable to becoming radicalised.

How India is vulnerable to internet radicalisation?

• India is much impacted by the threat posed by terrorists using Internet.
• Many youths from western coast are reported victims of internet radicalisation.
• India’s pluralism make it particularly sensitive to the dangers.
• The rapid growth of internet users in India is now close to 500 million and growing, this underlines the scale of the challenge.

What is the action plan to contain terrorism via internet?

• Responses to terrorism must be similar across geographies and cultures, where differential standards must not be accepted.
• Critical Internet resources and data centres should be dispersed and redundant to mitigate impact of major terror attacks.
• Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) is formed by Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube, it formalizes and structures how the companies work together to curtail the spread of terrorism and violent extremism.
• UN General Assembly re-affirmed their collective determination to prevent the Internet from being misused by terrorist groups and individuals.

Source: Business Line