San Bernardino mass killer Syed Rizwan Farook had been in contact on social media with extremists known to the FBI, a U.S. intelligence official said Thursday – a development that refocused attention on the shocking reach radical jihadists have through Internet communications.
“For terrorist groups, the opportunity is there to try to spread their message,’’ said Lasell College professor Dana Janbek, coauthor of the 2010 book “Global Terrorism and New Media: The Post-Al Qaeda Generation,’’ who has studied online jihadist recruitment communications extensively.
The FBI and California investigators are just beginning to piece together what motivated the 28-year-old Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, 27, to kill 14 people and injure 21 Wednesday.
What is clear to experts like Janbek and Sam Westrop, research director for Americans for Peace and Tolerance, a group that monitors Islamist extremism, is how easily anyone inclined to radical Islamic inspiration can find it online.
“He looks on social media, he looks on Twitter, he's inundated with pictures of dead babies in Syria, and that leap from non- violent extremism to violent extremism suddenly becomes very possible,’’ Westrop said.
A new study released this month by George Washington University's Program on Extremism, called “Isis in America, from Retweets to Raqqa,” found 71 Americans have been arrested since March 2014 for “ISIS-related activity.’’ The report says you can find 300 U.S. ISIS supporters on Twitter, from all 50 states, and just this year alone, ISIS has produced over 1,800 videos and 14,500 graphics in nine languages, all available online.
Social media alone, however, rarely creates radical jihadists, experts generally agree.
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“Simply going online is not going to, all of a sudden overnight, radicalize someone,’’ Janbek said. “Face-to-face communication continues to play the greatest role in trying to radicalize someone.’’
Westrop said that “there is a danger, by obsessing over social media and the threat it poses, that we ignore the real causes of radicalization,’’ which overwhelmingly come from extremist mosques or worship centers or study circles. Radical jihadist content online, Westrop said, acts like a “booster shot. They get their ideas somewhere else, and social media provides that last bit of ammunition that drives them to commit a violent act.’’
And a huge challenge for authorities monitoring social network chatter on jihadist sites is understanding who’s truly dangerous, and who’s just making noise. “The million-dollar question is really trying to establish, from all the thousands of messages that are online, which ones are going to translate to a real threat and which ones are simply rhetoric.’’
With videographer Sean G. Colahan
