Problem being addressed
Extremist and terrorist groups use the Internet for a myriad of purposes including psychological warfare, propaganda, fundraising, recruitment and mobilization, networking, information sharing, planning/coordination, data manipulation and misinformation. All active terrorist groups have established at least one form of presence on the Internet and most of them are using several formats of online platforms1. Therefore, online content monitoring and analysis is a critical part of almost every national security investigation.
Importance for Society
From 2015 to now, 20+ terrorist attacks occurred in EU28, all of them carried out by individuals radicalized by terrorist propaganda. Recruitment of this new breed of terrorists was done via social media and the Internet. To prevent such events from happening in the future and fight radicalization, it is crucial to detect cyberpropaganda early. However, social media providers (e.g. Twitter) admit that at the moment there is no adequate tool to identify terrorist-related content on the Internet. As the result, they are forced to rely on proprietary spam-fighting tools, user reports and human analysis to track down radicalized accounts that promote terrorism.
Overall Objective
INSIKT provides a novel solution for LEA analysts to detect terrorist propaganda on all social media: it identifies radical content, suspicious messages and covert radicalization process with the help of sophisticated text mining algorithms. INSIKT relies on deep learning to develop automatically new models which can be used to detect other criminal activity as well, and it is fit to become an important new tool in LEAs’ investigation and evidence gathering arsenal, giving them highly accurate, multilingual and real-time detection capabilities.
