Digital Citizens: Countering Extremism Online

"...there is a dearth of high quality resources designed to increase the resilience of young people to extremism and radicalisation in a digital context, and those explicitly digital citizenship resources that do exist do not substantively address extremism online."

This report from the United Kingdom (UK) think tank Demos finds that equipping young students with critical thinking skills is effective in improving their resilience to extremist material online. Setting out of the findings of a digital citizenship intervention developed by Demos and Bold Creative under the Home Office's Prevent Innovation Fund, it shows how a skills-based, rather than an ideology-based, approach can be an effective and more inclusive countering extremism strategy for young people. The intervention involved developing, testing, and evaluating new resources to help schools tackle online radicalisation. At a time when social media and the influence of extremism are growing, this report seeks to add to the public evidence base regarding counter-extremism interventions in a school context and to contribute to the development of effective education for digital citizens.

As noted here, in July 2015, under section 26 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015, all UK schools became subject to what is known as the Prevent duty. This duty holds that "a specified authority must, in the exercise of its functions, have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism". There is, thus, a more rigorous set of proactive requirements for schools to implement to protect students and to challenge the narratives and ideas that give sustenance to extremists and terrorist groups. "In order to discharge the Prevent duty effectively, schools and teachers need suitable resources and guidance to inform and support their efforts, to help them work successfully in partnership with local authorities, to train staff to identify at-risk children and bridge sensitive discussions around extremism, and to help pupils stay safe online....In this report we argue that digital citizenship education must play a vital role in the delivery of the Prevent duty. To build resilience to extremism effectively, young people online have to be able to critically evaluate the arguments and media content presented by extremists, to safeguard each other successfully online, and to understand how social media change the dynamics of communication and how we interact with each other online. Effective digital citizenship education, designed with these needs in mind and with a specific reflection on extremism, can be the vehicle for the development of this resilience."

Chapter 2 presents the context for the pilot intervention, describes the changing social media landscape in which young people find themselves and the changing profile of extremism online, and makes the case for a digital-citizenship-based approach to countering extremism.

Chapter 3 presents Demos' analysis of best practice in school-based countering violent extremism (CVE) and safeguarding interventions in order to inform the design of the intervention, drawing on interviews with 11 key stakeholders in CVE, Prevent delivery, educational interventions, and public policy, and a review of 9 evaluations and meta-evaluations of comparable interventions. It also presents a rapid review of 12 existing digital citizenship resources. Some key findings of this review:

• For longer-term impacts, interventions should focus on concrete skills development rather than on general, ideological messaging.
• The objectives of the intervention should be clearly stated at the beginning and restated throughout.
• Discussions allowing the expression and exploration of social and religious identities, and the promotion of positive social narratives, are an important part of extremism-related interventions.
• The delivery of interventions by external delivery staff is often a superior alternative to delivery by teachers. Deliverers should be both credible experts and understand the curriculum.
• The intervention should consider a broad range of types of extremism, including Islamist and far right, to prevent particular students feeling alienated.
• Young people respond well to leading the dialogue within the intervention, and a dialogue-based rather than a didactic approach is often more effective. This can be successfully facilitated by role play.
• Content should be eye-opening, realistic, and relevant to the situation of the participants, and presented with the appropriate sensitivity.
• The delivery of the session should be tailored to differing perspectives, attitudes, and levels of knowledge within different groups.
• The impact an intervention seeks to achieve should be realistic, limited, and aligned with the time available in which to deliver the programme.
• The intervention should be directly related to the needs of schools and pupils and ideally tied into the broader curriculum for greatest effect.

Chapter 4 describes the pilot intervention, the design process, the resources developed and their key characteristics, and the theory of change underpinning the intervention. This intervention sought to teach young people how to recognise online propaganda and manipulation, understand how social media change how we communicate, and develop a sense of responsibility over their online social networks. In brief, 4 schools took part in the pilot workshops - 2 in Leicester and 2 in Ealing. Created by Demos and Bold Creative, the resources were based around an interactive digital presentation deck, which presented anonymised, real-life instances of extremist propaganda and dialogue on a range of social media platforms. These conversations included video and rich media content on far-right extremism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamist extremism. This deck was supplemented with a range of other materials, including professionally produced A3 print out cards illustrating an extremist conversation online and blank cards allowing participants to involve themselves in the conversation and apply the skills they have learned. In addition, workshop plans, teacher guidance, and a glossary of key terms were produced in order to help teachers deliver the resources in the absence of external delivery assistance. These resources were delivered through 2 one-hour-long workshops held during personal, social, health, and economic (PSHE), religious education (RE), or Citizenship lesson time. The first workshop focused predominantly on critical thinking and the recognition of online propaganda, and the second workshop focused predominantly on digital citizenship and peer-to-peer safeguarding. Both were designed to convey a positive social narrative to the participants: that they were in a position of power on social media and that they had to take a lead in terms of identifying and arguing against extremism and hate speech online, as well as in terms of peer-to-peer support. It also focused on the development of specific skills, including the recognition of propaganda and poor arguments and critical thinking, as well as specific knowledge of the different ways in which social media changes the way in which we communicate online.

Chapter 5 presents the evaluation of the pilot project, describing the impact of the intervention and assessing the delivery process. In summary, in all 3 areas that were the focus of the intervention - critical thinking skills, digital citizenship, and how social media change how we communicate - the pilot project had statistically significant impacts. The intervention was viewed favourably by teachers, and participants felt they were relevant, understood them, and enjoyed them. The key findings of the evaluation, which are based on pre- and post-surveys in participants and comparison groups, focus groups with participants, and interviews with classroom teachers, represent changes in the participant group over the course of taking part in the programme, which are compared with changes in the comparison group. However, participants and comparison group members were not selected randomly. As a result, it is difficult to draw wide conclusions about the effectiveness of the pilot project. These are the key findings of the impact evaluation:

• Over the course of the programme, there was a statistically significant (10%) increase in participants' confidence that they could distinguish between truth and lies on social media.
• There was a statistically significant (12%) increase in participants' confidence that they understand what techniques are used to manipulate people on social media.
• There was a statistically significant (10%) increase in participants' confidence that they would know what to do if confronted with hate speech online.
• The intervention had a statistically significant positive effect on participants' understanding of key terms associated with online discourse - particularly "echo chamber" and "keyboard warriors".
• Both the surveys and focus groups showed that participants overwhelmingly felt they had gained knowledge and new skills from the workshops: 89% said they had learned some or learned lots of new skills and knowledge, and 94% of participants reported they understood "some" or "all" of the content by the end of the workshops.
• The analysis of the civic judgement scenarios in the pre- and post-surveys suggest that the intervention made participants more likely to report extremist material or hate speech online to the police and less likely to take actions that purely benefit themselves. Participants were also less likely to justify their actions on emotional or selfish grounds and more likely to justify them through more constructive, solution-orientated reasoning.

The process evaluation also returned positive results, and the qualitative data attested to the efficacy of the programme while also providing feedback for future improvements.

As noted in the concluding chapter, the evaluation will inform the further development and improvement of these resources in the future. Demos plans to expand this series of workshops from 2 to 3 sessions in order to allow for a greater degree of revision and review of the content. Demos further plans to develop more holistic teacher guidance and supporting documentation in order to reduce the knowledge threshold required for teachers to deliver these resources themselves. Following the success of this intervention, and having made revisions to these resources, Demos plans to deliver their interventions in schools in partnership with Bold Creative and to make these resources available online for free.