Nearly 30,000 EU nationals applied to become British citizens in the 12 months after last summer’s Brexit vote – almost double the number of the previous year.
Home Office statistics show 28,502 such applications between July 2016 and June 2017, up 80% from 15,871 in 2015-16.
The total number of applications, from all nationalities, fell by 8%.
Jonathan Portes, a professor at King’s College London, said: “Historically, immigrants from outside the EU have been much more likely than EU migrants to apply for UK citizenship.”
But the uncertainty over EU citizens’ rights in the UK after Brexit means “many EU citizens living here are seeking UK citizenship, at least as an insurance policy”, he added.
One of the most noticeable changes was among Germans, with applications almost tripling.
Applications from nationals of eight eastern European countries which joined the EU in 2004 rose by 45% to 9,841 – Poland had the highest with 6,179.
EU countries with most applications 2016-17 (% increase from 2015-16): Home Office statistics
1. Poland 6,179 (+43.9%)
2. Italy 2,950 (+166%)
3. Romania 2,713 (+40%)
4. France 2,508 (+168.5%)
5. Germany 2,338 (+193.4%)
6. Bulgaria 1,697 (+43.8%)
The Home Office report said increases in applications from EU nationals in recent years are “likely to reflect immigration in earlier years while the most recent rise may be partly due to the impact of rule changes and recent events”.
The rights of the three million EU citizens living in the UK following Brexit is one of the key issues in the UK government’s negotiations with Brussels.
While there has been a rise in applications from EU nationals, the number from the rest of the world has fallen by 18% in the last 12 months – from 131,266 to 107,410.
Meanwhile, ONS figures released on Thursday showed net migration – the difference between those entering and leaving the UK – fell 81,000 to 246,000 in the year to March 2017.
That was partly because the number of EU citizens who decided to leave the UK increased by 33,000 year-on-year to 122,000 – the highest departure number for nearly a decade.
Interesting and pertinent account by Stephanie Y. Zhou of another aspect of diversity: social class in medical school and among doctors:
My family was supported by a homeless shelter before we moved into subsidized housing — the attic near the hospital. Food came from the food bank or soup kitchens. Clothing was second hand from the church donation bins. My parents did not have a university education, but they found jobs as factory workers and on most days, we seemed to have enough to get by.
To me, these were all part of a mundane, normal life, but in the context of privilege, these aspects suddenly became salient as a mark of “underprivilege.” Placed at a school attended by mostly middle-class students, this underprivileged experience became part of my identity, and to be different was incredibly isolating.
This identity of subordinance provided the impetus for me to pursue higher education. To be told that fields such as medicine or law were not in the realm of my socioeconomic class, that they carried an enormous financial investment with uncertain admission, made me resent my underprivileged identity even more. I wanted to be able to give my family the privileges we didn’t have and to break away from a cycle of poverty.
I studied hard and worked two part-time jobs during university to fund my medical school applications, but throughout the whole process, it was clear that one had to come from privilege to easily apply and assimilate into the medical culture.
In fact, not only are a disproportionate number of students from families of higher socioeconomic class, they come prepared with the social and cultural capital to navigate the medical school environment. Upon acceptance, I became a part of this new culture. Not wanting to be different, I hid my identity to feel included.
It wasn’t until I left the classroom that these sentiments began to change. I remember the single mother, with limited time to take off work, miss her own appointments to attend her daughter’s appointments instead. I saw patients who did not take their medications because they were too expensive. Patients with a language barrier who incorrectly interpreted their treatment plan because they didn’t understand. I saw myself and the experiences of my family in the lives of these patients, and I realized that I did fit into medicine — I fit in with my patients.
Although I initially tried to distance myself from my identity, I now acknowledge that it is a part of me I shouldn’t erase. To come from this background grants a different, more subtle form of privilege beyond that of wealth and social networks. I call it an “empathic privilege” that allows one to be more cognizant of the social determinants of health that patients often leave unspoken when seeking medical care.
In another sense, I also feel comfort in the presence of patients with lower socioeconomic status, whereas others might feel unease and frustration, because working with these patients helps close the gap between my identities.
I share my story because those with the underprivileged identity do exist in medicine, but they are a silent minority. Race and gender are easy to see, but low socioeconomic status may not be visible. Speaking about underprivilege may seem out of place, when now, as a result of luck and circumstance, you land among the most privileged.
Medical schools continue moving toward making the admissions process more equitable and diverse. However, measures to maintain and support diversity beyond the intake stage are often not in place. Students are then put in the position of negotiating a dual identity — one consistent with the medical culture, the other staying true to their social and cultural origins.
Medical schools should look one step back and one step forward in the admissions process. Before students from under-represented backgrounds can begin to use application subsidies or affirmative action initiatives, getting them to contemplate medicine in the first place requires an alignment between their identity and the identity associated with this vocation.
I encourage medical students and practicing physicians to be open about their stories, to humanize the identity of medicine so it doesn’t seem so lofty to those at a lower starting line — to show that a lived experience in poverty is valued by medical schools as much as, if not more than, having volunteered at a homeless shelter.
Looking forward, schools should continue diversity initiatives postadmission, whereby physicians from under-represented backgrounds support a culture of mentorship for like students, to facilitate development of their identity and strengths.
I am grateful to have lived in the dual worlds of underprivilege and privilege. I know what it feels like to not have choice, to have external factors, such as money and other people, dictate the path of my life. For many patients, it may feel the same — when their bodies and their lives are now in the hands of others.
Underprivilege has also taught me the importance of valuing chances, to hold on to them, offering my wholehearted effort toward these opportunities, because they were the threads of luck that helped pull me to the side of privilege. These experiences have taught me more about empathy and hard work than any medical school class could, and for that, to have been underprivileged is perhaps the greatest privilege in medicine.
Good discussion of some of the issues involved which IMO lay out the need for some government leadership in setting up guidelines and possibly regulations:
In the aftermath of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., where dozens were injured and one counter-protestor was killed, the battle moved online.
But should a tech company have that power? Even Cloudflare’s CEO Matthew Prince, who personally decided to pull the plug, thinks the answer should be “no” in the future.
“I am confident we made the right decision in the short term because we needed to have this conversation,” Prince said on the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask. “We couldn’t have the conversation until we made that determination. But it is the wrong decision in the long term. Infrastructure is never going to be the right place to make these sorts of editorial decisions.”
Interviewed by Recode’s Kara Swisher and The Verge’s Lauren Goode, Prince was joined on the new episode by the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn. Although the two organizations have worked together in the past, Cohn co-authored a public rebuke of Cloudflare’s decision, saying it threatened the “future of free expression.”
“The moment where this is about Nazis, to me, is very late in the conversation,” Cohn said, citing past attempts to shut down political websites. “What they do is they take down the whole website, they can’t just take down the one bad article. The whole Recode website comes down because you guys say something that pisses off some billionaire.”
“These companies, including Matthew’s, have a right to decide who they’re doing business with, but we urge them to be really, really cautious about this,” she added.
Prince and Cohn agreed that part of the long-term solution to controversial speech online — no matter how odious — may be establishing and respecting a set of transparent, principled rules that cross international borders.
“I believe deeply in free speech, but it doesn’t have the same force around the rest of the world,” Prince said. “What does is an idea of due process, that there are a set of rules you should follow, and you should be able to know going into that. I don’t think the tech industry has that set of due processes.”
Cohn noted that there is a process for stopping someone from speaking before they can speak — prior restraint. For most of America’s history, obtaining such an injunction against someone has been intentionally difficult.
“We wouldn’t have a country if people couldn’t voice radical ideas and they had to go through a committee of experts or tech bros,” she said. “If you have to go on bended knee before you get to speak, you’re going to reduce the universe of ideas. Maybe you’ll get some heinous ideas, but you might not get the Nelson Mandelas, either.”
Data provides the basis for more informed policies and practices:
School boards across Ontario should collect comprehensive data on their students’ race, ethnicity, religion and gender identity, a new report by York University urges.
This demographic data could help educators make learning more inclusive, from tackling systemic racism to designing lessons relevant to all students’ experiences, says the report, commissioned by the Ontario Ministry of Education.
“If you want to be able to work with particular groups of students, you should know who they are, otherwise you might be putting (resources) where they’re not addressing the issues directly, and that doesn’t help,” said Carl James, a York University education professor and co-author of the report.
The Toronto District School Boards collects information on student backgrounds through a census produced every five years.
Data collected in those surveys has helped show that Black students are twice as likely to be suspended from school and twice as likely to be enrolled in “non-academic” courses compared with other students.
The Peel District School Board has said it plans to collect race-based data through its own student census, expected to launch in 2018.
The York report’s call for improved data collection falls in line with the province’s three-year plan to battle systemic racism, unveiled in March.
Legislation expected to be tabled as part of this plan would make race-based data collection mandatory in Ontario’s education, child welfare, health and justice systems.
School boards across the province can improve upon the data they already have by requesting demographic information on students’ registration forms, James said.
“Right now, the long-form census does collect race data, so it’s not something that’s beyond what we collect in Canada,” he added.
The York report called for school boards to improve their demographic data collection no later than 2018-2019.
The tracking of racial, religious or ethnic information has garnered criticism in the past, from people concerned it can be used to profile or single out a particular race, particularly if the information is collected by police.
But race-based data can be an extremely positive step, as long as it is collected and used responsibly, said Anthony Morgan, a lawyer who specializes in issues of racial justice.
“(Data) has immense potential to be positive, but it has immense potential to be negative depending on who has access to the information, how it’s reported, who it’s reported to and what’s done to manipulate it — and that should be a valid concern,” Morgan said. “If the proper infrastructure is set up for the data to be collected that is fair, that is transparent . . . that is supported with parental involvement, I think we’re moving in the right direction.”
James acknowledged that the topic of race-based data could cause discomfort in some people. But race and other elements of a person’s background are an important part of who they are, he said.
“There’s a sense that we don’t see race, but, at the same time, we do see race,” James added. “Sometimes people think to see race is to be racist (but) to see race is . . . just to understand that it’s part of the person.”
A good integration news story from Malmo for a change:
The main square of Malmö’s alternative Möllevången district bursts with colour on Saturdays. The open-air market is in full force; fulsome purple aubergines are stacked proudly next to emerald fronds of coriander and stallholders complain about the weather with friends in foreign tongues. This cosmopolitan corner of Malmö has transformed in recent years from a working class area to a radically multicultural district, where hipsters and refugees rub shoulders. It’s also a hub for some of the most authentic Syrian food outside of Syria.
In 2015, at the peak of the crisis in Syria, Sweden took in more Syrian refugees per capita than any other European country. Of the 163,000 refugees who arrived there in 2015, 32,000 were granted asylum and many of those chose to come to Malmö, where there was already a growing Middle Eastern population.
Shamiat was the first Syrian restaurant in Malmö, founded on 1 October 2013. I visit the branch in Bergsgatan, five minutes from the square. Inside, owner Maurice Salloum twirls the ends of his handlebar moustache ruminatively as his staff lay out a feast of mezze. Salloum arrived in Malmö in 2012, at the start of the civil war, and it took him 18 days to get to Sweden from his home in Damascus. Last year Shamiat was named best Middle Eastern restaurant by a local newspaper. It was the cementing of Salloum’s place in this new city.
“I was feeling fantastic,” he says. “I was very happy and proud that the Swedish people have accepted me to be here in this country”. But he still worries that not all Swedes have accepted the migrant population. There was a terrorist attack in Stockholm in April, perpetrated by a rejected asylum seeker from Uzbekistan who announced his sympathy with Isis. “This made me very sad,” says Salloum, “I baked bread that day and went out there to give the bread away for free.”
Salloum decided to open his restaurant because he saw a gap in the market. The name of the restaurant means “Damascene,” and is also a name for a dish which is only found in Damascus.
“Before we came, there was no Damascene food available in Malmö, so we work hard to give customers something special and unique,” he adds.
I try the fattoush, a salad of roughly chopped leaves, pepper wedges, olives and fried flatbread, drenched in pomegranate syrup. “It’s a very nice, typical dish, a bit like tabbouleh,” says Salloum. It is sharp and sweet and rustic – and nothing like tabbouleh.
The trend for Middle Eastern cuisine was first brought to Malmö by Lebanese and Turkish immigrants, who created the foundations of a food scene that, in turn, helped the Syrian restaurants to flourish here.
Down the road on Baltzarsgatan 21 is Laziza, a modern Lebanese restaurant whose bountiful buffet food attracts 300 customers a day. The owner, Sadoo Iskandarani, says his grandfather opened up the very first falafel place in Malmö.
“He was my idol,” he says. “He was good with bread and falafel. In the Nineties he started a cart selling falafel in Helsingborg and people loved it. The teachers came to eat there and the police officers came, then maybe 20 bikers would come and stand in line, queuing for falafel.
“I think Malmö has the best of all the cultures that live here and that food is building the bridges between the cultures.”
The most recent addition to Malmö’s Syrian restaurant scene is Ayam Dimashq, which roughly translates as “Days of our life in Damascus”. It’s north of Möllevången, on the borders of the Varnhem and Carolikvarteren districts, on Östra Förstadsgatan.
Chef-owner Huni Awwad opened it just nine months ago. He came to Sweden four years ago, when he was 39. Unlike many of the younger men who move to Sweden from Syria, Huni was already well-established with his own large, successful restaurant back in Damascus, called Peacebird.
Ayam is beautifully designed, with a modern, geometric logo and tapestries depicting landmarks and streets in Damascus, with small details picked out in gold thread.
“Everything’s coming together fast here,” says Huni. “In my country everything is a little bit slower, but I come here, open a restaurant, get married and have a boy – and I have another boy on the way – all in four years!”
He came here by boat; it took him five attempts.
“I don’t know why I made it on the fifth attempt but I thought to myself, ‘I can’t turn back this time. I might die, but I can’t turn back. ’Luckily I am here, so it’s good.”
His fattah is a warm blend of pureed chickpeas, yoghurt and sesame, with soft pieces of flatbread melting underneath. It’s topped with toasted cashews, pomegranate seeds, fried strips of flatbread, pine nuts and sprinkled with sumac. The flavours are beautiful.
Awwad’s life seems to have fallen into place here, but the move from Syria was a necessity, not a choice. He works a long day; it’s Ramadan and Midsummer, so he’ll stay open until 4am for his Muslim customers to break their fast.
“It is very hard when you change your whole life,” he says. “It is a good life here, very good, people are very nice and I think my life here resembles my life in Damascus – but it is not my life. My heart is in Damascus.” He looks up at the wall-hanging depicting a winding cobbled street lined with ancient buildings. “I hope one day to walk these streets again, and taste the food of home.”
Al-Azhar Grand Sheikh, Ahmed al-Tayyeb, stressed that the “inheritance rules” in Islam are clear and “definitive”, rejecting the Tunisian president’s call for equality between men and women in regards to inheritance.
Tayyeb added in a statement Sunday that, inheritance is regulated in the Quran by clear and definitive verses that leave no room for interpretation, unlike other verses that could be interpreted by scholars in more than one way,
He added that such rulings cannot be allowed, as they are not based in the study of Sharia or Islamic scriptures, pointing out that such ideas provoke the Muslim masses and could lead to destabilization in Muslim societies.
Tayyeb stated he firmly rejects political interference with the set rules of Islamic Sharia.
Al-Azhar declared its position on the equality between men and women in inheritance based on the religious responsibility it has held for more than a thousand years, and to make clear the rules of Islamic Sharia to the Islamic nation around the world, Tayyeb said in a statement on Sunday.
The sheikh went on to say that the institution guards the rules of Islam around the world regardless of geographic borders or political orientations.
A thoughtful exploration of the different forms of privilege, and the complexities involved by Martin Regg Cohn.
Money quote: “prejudice and privilege come in all shades and colours.”
The latest manifestations of white supremacy have reminded us that Jews, not just Blacks, are perennial targets at neo-Nazi rallies.
Put another way, African Americans and Ashkenazi Americans are seen as equally un-American by the blue-eyed, red-blooded, all-American white nationalists who chanted in Charlottesville, “Jews will not replace us.”
That shared demonization comes as no surprise to many Jews who know their history. And who have watched with apprehension the present-day tendency to lash out at so many other “others” — be they brown, Black, Indigenous or Muslim.
But the resurgence of anti-Semitism is also an awkward reminder that “white privilege,” supposedly enjoyed by white Jews and all other white folks, offers little protection from persecution or privation. Now, as the casual invocation of white privilege gains greater currency, it’s worth examining some of the questionable assumptions that underpin it — and undermine it.
This is not an attempt to shoot down the important social analysis behind the theory of “white privilege” — the idea that most whites have “unearned” advantages notably in dealing with the police, employment and education. But relying on colour to confer privilege on people — an entire class of people — is conflating, confusing and counterproductive.
When a phrase risks alienating potential allies in the quest for greater equality of opportunity, it’s time for better terminology. Much like “cultural appropriation,” the “white privilege” paradigm emerged from the academic world, which speaks in its own rarefied and coded jargon, often obscuring rather than clarifying real-world issues. Beyond the ivory tower, where colour analysis has superseded class analysis, the term “white privilege” is being used, misused and misunderstood.
I hope I have a head start in understanding the obstacles others face. My grandparents didn’t just face discrimination but death in the 1940s. I still have a Montreal Gazette clipping about the landlord who wouldn’t rent to my father in the 1950s because of our Jewish surname (which made the stories about Donald Trump’s father rejecting Black tenants personal for me).
Privilege is part of any society that stratifies itself along various lines — hierarchical, patriarchal, economical, geographical, political, religious. But when “white privilege” is appropriated as a proxy for societal unfairness, it too easily breeds resentment.
It is a classic anti-Semitic trope to confer privilege and power on Jews — propagating the pre-Nazi, Nazi and neo-Nazi fiction that they control the media, the banks, the world (you might call it fake news . . .). We are not reliving the 1930s today, but whether in Hitler’s Germany or Trump’s America, the privileged can be persecuted in the blink of an eye.
And not just Jews. Citizens of Japanese descent were unjustly incarcerated in Canada and the U.S. in the Second World War for fear they were fascist fifth columnists. Today, students of Asian descent are viewed skeptically for their disproportionate university enrolment. Talk of informal “Asian quotas” among college admissions officers has personal resonance given the formal Jewish quotas enforced at major universities in the 1950s.
Beware white privilege, for class and cultural differences are no less critical.
It is one of the great conceits of whites that we flagellate ourselves as the world’s most unrepentant racists. Go to Indonesia, where the majority has hounded an ethnic Chinese minority for decades as a “privileged” group of shopkeepers. Think of Vietnam, where so many boat people were ethnic Chinese fleeing persecution. Consider Hong Kong, where those of Indian descent are disparaged and whites are mocked as “gweilos” (ghosts). In East Africa, Ismailis of South Asia origin have been persecuted for decades. Entrenched homophobia across Africa conjures up Black heterosexual privilege. India’s caste system has long co-existed with a colour continuum that prompts marriage prospects to describe themselves as having “wheatish” complexions, as against less socially desirable “dusky.”
The reality everywhere is that race and skin colour are clumsy proxies for social distinctions that matter at least as much: Ageism is a chronic affliction. The urban-rural in Ontario and across North America is deeply rooted. Postsecondary education is ever more accessible, yet driving more enduring disparities for those left behind.
Yes, we need constant reminders of our blind spots, but white privilege is hardly the clearest prism for viewing the world. Whites assuredly have advantages — on average. But averages are just generalizations, which lend themselves to stereotypes, which can be skin deep. Averages disguise the individual variations underneath.
We live in a world of competing victimhoods. But if everyone plays victim — even the billionaire President Donald Trump and the white nationalists he flirts with — then no one is a victim.
When white Jews are targeted by so-called white nationalists, the notion of white privilege loses its colour palette. But it reminds everyone — not least Jews who joined the civil rights battles of the 1960s, in the wake of the Holocaust of the 1940s — that we must all stick together, even if we come at it from different life experiences.
Which is why we need a better term than white privilege. Because prejudice and privilege come in all shades and colours.
Interesting study, one that suggests biases are common to many groups, with the wrinkle that ‘prompts’ of compassion appear to attenuate the effects:
The marketplace is becoming more inclusive than ever. Today, advertisements that include models from ethnic minorities are commonplace. That wasn’t the norm a few decades ago.
Academic and market research show that ethnic minority consumers like advertisements that include their own ethnic group. They also appreciate brands that use such advertising.
However, research has overlooked how ethnic minority consumers evaluate advertising that feature members of other ethnic minorities.
In a forthcoming paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing, our team of marketing experts at three Canadian universities reports a backlash effect. Ethnic minority consumers feel more ostracized by advertisements featuring models who belong to other ethnic minority groups than they do when they see ads with white models. And that leads to a less favourable attitude toward those advertisements.
In North America, white models advertising a variety of products has been the norm for decades. We argue that when advertisers include ethnic minority models, racially diverse consumers take notice.
But if the models are not from their own ethnic group, they may wonder why the advertisers chose models of another race or culture. They question why their own ethnicity is not represented.
We conducted five experimental studies with American and Canadian participants belonging to different ethnic minority groups. Participants consistently reported more positive attitudes towards advertisements that featured white models. They felt ostracized by the advertisements featuring members of other ethnic minorities.
This backlash was especially true for participants whose membership in their own ethnic group was important to them. It was strongest for participants with so-called high social-dominance orientation, a personality trait indicative of political conservatism.
Advertisements that feature multiple models of different ethnicities suffer from the backlash too.
In one study, Asian and Latino American participants were shown a bank advertisement that included models from several ethnic backgrounds. For half of the participants, the advertisement included a person belonging to their own ethnicity. For the other half, the advertisement excluded models belonging to their own ethnicity.
Participants who saw the advertisement that featured a model of their own ethnic group evaluated the advertisement more positively than those who did not see their ethnic group represented.
Portrayals of compassion change ad perceptions
We also found that advertisements that promote thoughts of compassion do not face the same backlash as other advertisements. In one study, ethnic minority participants who viewed an advertisement featuring another ethnic minority showed higher preference for the advertisement when it included words like sympathetic, gentle and forgiving than when it did not include such words.
In general, compassion increases our perceived similarity to others. And so advertisements highlighting compassion make us more likely to see people as similar to us regardless of their ethnicity.
Our takeaway from this research is that ethnic minority consumers do not see themselves as one large minority group. They take note of which ethnicity is represented in advertisements, and may not appreciate advertisers who consistently overlook theirs.
We encourage advertisers to be inclusive, because ads featuring ethnic minorities are received positively by those groups that are included. Advertisers should also aim to be thoughtful when it comes to which ethnic groups they highlight in their advertising.
A prominent coalition of American rabbis has decided not to hold its annual conference call with the president to mark Jewish holidays, citing Donald Trump’s remarks on the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, as supporting “those who advocate anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia.”
“We have concluded that President Trump’s statements during and after the tragic events in Charlottesville are so lacking in moral leadership and empathy for the victims of racial and religious hatred that we cannot organize such a call this year,” the groups — the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Rabbinical Assembly, Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association and Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism — said in a statement.
The coalition represents the leaders of much of the U.S. Jewish community, with the exception of Orthodox Jews, who have been much more supportive of Trump. His daughter Ivanka and her family are Orthodox Jews. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
The call, which is organized by the Reform rabbis group CCAR, is a standard event for presidents each year. Rabbi Steve Fox, CCAR’s executive director, said former President Barack Obama participated in each year of his administration.
“These are religious issues, not political issues. It is important that the president steps forward as a moral leader on these issues,” Fox said in an interview. “As the leader of the U.S. and the leader of the free world, we believe it is his obligation to condemn these white supremacists.”
Fox said Trump’s response to the Charlottesville unrest — among other comments, the president said there were “very fine people” amid a crowd of white supremacists and neo-Nazis protesting in defense of a Confederate statue — put the celebration of the Jewish High Holy Days at risk.
“We pray that President Trump will recognize and remedy the grave error he has made in abetting the voices of hatred,” the group said. “We pray that those who traffic in anti-Semitism, racism and xenophobia will see that there is no place for such pernicious philosophies in a civilized society.”
Trump has faced a barrage of criticism since the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that left one person dead. Trump has defended his response that “many sides” are to blame for the violence that ensued. At a campaign rally in Phoenix on Tuesday, the president accused the media of misrepresenting his response and read parts of his initial remarks, though he omitted the controversial language that seemingly placed blame on counter-protesters.
Most members on Trump’s evangelical council, meanwhile, have not distanced themselves from the president. A.R. Bernard, who once a member of the Evangelical Advisory Board, said on Friday that he resigned due to a “deepening conflict in values” between himself and the Trump administration.
Interesting approach, applicable to extremists and radicals, whether on right, left or other:
Law enforcement officials, technology companies and lawmakers have long tried to limit what they call the “radicalization” of young people over the internet.
The term has often been used to describe a specific kind of radicalization — that of young Muslim men who are inspired to take violent action by the online messages of Islamist groups like the Islamic State. But as it turns out, it isn’t just violent jihadists who benefit from the internet’s power to radicalize young people from afar.
White supremacists are just as adept at it. Where the pre-internet Ku Klux Klan grew primarily from personal connections and word of mouth, today’s white supremacist groups have figured out a way to expertly use the internet to recruit and coordinate among a huge pool of potential racists. That became clear two weeks ago with the riots in Charlottesville, Va., which became a kind of watershed event for internet-addled racists.
“It was very important for them to coordinate and become visible in public space,” said Joan Donovan, a scholar of media manipulation and right-wing extremism at Data & Society, an online research institute. “This was an attempt to say, ‘Let’s come out; let’s meet each other. Let’s build camaraderie, and let’s show people who we are.’”
Ms. Donovan and others who study how the internet shapes extremism said that even though Islamists and white nationalists have different views and motivations, there are broad similarities in how the two operate online — including how they spread their message, recruit and organize offline actions. The similarities suggest a kind of blueprint for a response — efforts that may work for limiting the reach of jihadists may also work for white supremacists, and vice versa.
In fact, that’s the battle plan. Several research groups in the United States and Europe now see the white supremacist and jihadi threats as two faces of the same coin. They’re working on methods to fight both, together — and slowly, they have come up with ideas for limiting how these groups recruit new members to their cause.
Their ideas are grounded in a few truths about how extremist groups operate online, and how potential recruits respond. After speaking to many researchers, I compiled this rough guide for combating online radicalization.
Recognize the internet as an extremist breeding ground.
The first step in combating online extremism is kind of obvious: It is to recognize the extremists as a threat.
For the Islamic State, that began to happen in the last few years. After a string of attacks in Europe and the United States by people who had been indoctrinated in the swamp of online extremism, politicians demanded action. In response, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other online giants began identifying extremist content and systematically removing it from their services, and have since escalated their efforts.
When it comes to fighting white supremacists, though, much of the tech industry has long been on the sidelines. This laxity has helped create a monster. In many ways, researchers said, white supremacists are even more sophisticated than jihadists in their use of the internet.
The earliest white nationalist sites date back to the founding era of the web. For instance, Stormfront.org, a pioneering hate site, was started as a bulletin board in 1990. White supremacist groups have also been proficient at spreading their messages using the memes, language and style that pervade internet subcultures. Beyond setting up sites of their own, they have more recently managed to spread their ideology to online groups that were once largely apolitical, like gaming and sci-fi groups.
And they’ve grown huge. “The white nationalist scene online in America is phenomenally larger than the jihadists’ audience, which tends to operate under the radar,” said Vidhya Ramalingam, the co-founder of Moonshot CVE, a London-based start-up that works with internet companies to combat violent extremism. “It’s just a stunning difference between the audience size.”
After the horror of Charlottesville, internet companies began banning and blocking content posted by right-wing extremist groups. So far their efforts have been hasty and reactive, but Ms. Ramalingam sees it as at the start of a wider effort.
“It’s really an unprecedented moment where social media and tech companies are recognizing that their platforms have become spaces where these groups can grow, and have been often unpoliced,” she said. “They’re really kind of waking up to this and taking some action.”
Engage directly with potential recruits.
If tech companies are finally taking action to prevent radicalization, is it the right kind of action? Extremism researchers said that blocking certain content may work to temporarily disrupt groups, but may eventually drive them further underground, far from the reach of potential saviors.
A more lasting plan involves directly intervening in the process of radicalization. Consider The Redirect Method, an anti-extremism project created by Jigsaw, a think tank founded by Google. The plan began with intensive field research. After interviews with many former jihadists, white supremacists and other violent extremists, Jigsaw discovered several important personality traits that may abet radicalization.
One factor is a skepticism of mainstream media. Whether on the far right or ISIS, people who are susceptible to extremist ideologies tend to dismiss outlets like The New York Times or the BBC, and they often go in search of alternative theories online.
Another key issue is timing. There’s a brief window between initial interest in an extremist ideology and a decision to join the cause — and after recruits make that decision, they are often beyond the reach of outsiders. For instance, Jigsaw found that when jihadists began planning their trips to Syria to join ISIS, they had fallen too far down the rabbit hole and dismissed any new information presented to them.
Jigsaw put these findings to use in an innovative way. It curated a series of videos showing what life is truly like under the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The videos, which weren’t filmed by news outlets, offered a credible counterpoint to the fantasies peddled by the group — they show people queuing up for bread, fighters brutally punishing civilians, and women and children being mistreated.
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Then, to make sure potential recruits saw the videos at the right time in their recruitment process, Jigsaw used one of Google’s most effective technologies: ad targeting. In the same way that a pair of shoes you looked up last week follows you around the internet, Jigsaw’s counterterrorism videos were pushed to likely recruits.
Jigsaw can’t say for sure if the project worked, but it found that people spent lots of time watching the videos, which suggested they were of great interest, and perhaps dissuaded some from extremism.
Moonshot CVE, which worked with Jigsaw on the Redirect project, put together several similar efforts to engage with both jihadists and white supremacist groups. It has embedded undercover social workers in extremist forums who discreetly message potential recruits to dissuade them. And lately it’s been using targeted ads to offer mental health counseling to those who might be radicalized.
“We’ve seen that it’s really effective to go beyond ideology,” Ms. Ramalingam said. “When you offer them some information about their lives, they’re disproportionately likely to interact with it.”
What happens online isn’t all that matters in the process of radicalization. The offline world obviously matters too. Dylann Roof — the white supremacist who murdered nine people at a historically African-American church in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 — was radicalized online. But as a new profile in GQ Magazine makes clear, there was much more to his crime than the internet, including his mental state and a racist upbringing.
Still, just about every hate crime and terrorist attack, these days, was planned or in some way coordinated online. Ridding the world of all of the factors that drive young men to commit heinous acts isn’t possible. But disrupting the online radicalization machine? With enough work, that may just be possible.
Multicultural Meanderings 