Extremists using networking sites to recruit

LONDON: When the English Defense League sprang to life two years ago, it had fewer than 50 members – a rough-and-tumble bunch of mostly white guys shouting from a street corner about what they viewed as uncontrolled Muslim immigration.

Now, the far-right group mentioned by confessed Norway gunman Anders Behring Breivik as an inspiration says its ranks have swollen to more than 10,000 people, a spectacular rise its leaders attribute to the immense global power of Facebook and other social networking sites.

“I knew that social networking sites were the way to go,” said EDL leader Stephen Lennon. “But to say that we inspired this lunatic to do what he did is wrong. We’ve never once told our supporters its alright to go out and be violent.”

A Facebook page under Breivik’s name was taken down shortly after the attacks last week. A Twitter account under his name had only one Tweet, on July 17, loosely citing English philosopher John Stuart Mill, “One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests.”

Norwegian investigators have pored through data on Breivik’s computer and say they now believe he was acting alone. They have also said they haven’t found any links of concern between Breivik and far right British groups such as the EDL.

In addition to Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter, the internet hosts thousands of forums for far-left, far-right and other extremist groups. In Germany alone, far-right groups ran some 1,000 websites and 38 online radio stations as of late last year with many aimed at recruiting followers. Social networking sites, complete with politically charged music, are particularly drawing younger audiences who increasingly get their information outside of traditional media.

Extremists “still favor online chat platforms – often with several hundred participants – but they are increasingly turning to social media,” said Germany’s office for the protection of the Constitution, which called the danger of recruitment “considerable.” Intelligence and law enforcement officials have mixed feelings about the sites. On one hand, they recognize the potential for recruiting groups or individuals into violent movements. On the other, the sites allow officials to track and catch perpetrators.

What’s undeniable is the social media’s power to bring together people with like-minded views. “Fifty years ago, if you believed that the Earth was populated by spies from Jupiter, it would have taken you quite some time to find someone else who shared the same belief,” said Bob Ayers, a London-based former US intelligence official. “That’s not the case today. Social networking sites have changed the mathematics of things, and with that change, comes both pros and cons.”

Several of the email addresses to which Breivik sent his 1,516-page manifesto hours before the Oslo bombing matched Facebook profiles of people flaunting neo-Nazi or ultra-nationalist symbols. ap

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Google and Facebook get personal in battle for social networking rewards

It is one month since the launch of Google+, a belated attempt at a social networking tool that invites users to follow friends’ activities in their news feed and share favourite content by marking it “+1″. If this sounds familiar, it shows the extent to which Google is playing catchup with Facebook, which is brewing a public offering next year that could value the firm at $100bn and, critically, has positioned itself as the gateway to the web for many of its 750 million users.

Much of this pressure is down to the abrasive ambition of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Even Google’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has conceded that Google has been late to the social networking space, with identity and personalisation now critical to the social experience for consumers, and the lucrative commercial opportunities that advertisers expect. But with Google’s proven commercial success nudging its market value towards $200bn, and data vaults that hold the browsing histories of most of the online population, is Google really on a downward trajectory, and is the era of search really ending?

Ben Gomes has worked on every aspect of Google’s core search product and is leading exploration into the social navigation of search. Despite Google’s forays into everything from video communities to mobile operating systems, he insists that at its heart Google is still a search company. It was search, he said, that fuelled the explosion of web content and, unsurprisingly, Gomes doesn’t see social data as a replacement for search but as a layer that accesses the information in a different way.

“We saw a symbiotic evolution of the web and search because people could find what they wanted more easily,” said Gomes, who joined Google in 1999. “We see social as a layer in search that provides you with more relevant information in certain situations, so if you were looking at product reviews, those of your friends would be marked in the results. But the most important thing in search is still the search term, and how your computer understands that.”

Though Google+ is an intelligent attempt at a social networking tool, it seems a typical Google product in that it is brilliantly, heavily engineered but lacks the human focus required for a social network – the fuel that has propelled Facebook to 750 million users.

With data from so many consumers informing so many Google products, why isn’t there more personalisation? “In most cases ‘personalisation’ just means giving you what you wanted in the first place,” said Gomes. “If two friends search ‘malt’ but one likes beer and one whisky, they will see different results. And if that kind of personalisation didn’t work, you’d just think search was broken.”

The issue of personalised search results based on our browsing history has become contentious. With news, for example, how can users be presented with an objective view of a story from multiple sources if Google serves up sites or perspectives that the user is known to like? “Diversity of results is something deeply baked into the algorithm tools we use, so that we hopefully give a broad perspective,” said Gomes. “But if you are interested in a topic you’d tend to do a very specific query anyway, and our first goal is to give you the information you want.”

Facebook rigidly maintains that social context is historically and socially relevant. “Anthropologically, we have been informed and influenced throughout time by the people around us, and that’s equally true on Facebook as it is offline,” said Facebook’s advertising chief, David Fischer. “Now we look at the networks people communicate in …

“There are important opportunities for marketers in getting their messages out through those friends and family connections. The social graph contains not just people, but brands, universities [and] institutions that people chose to connect to.”

This network of social, professional and commercial relationships may have always existed, but it is their accessibility as expressed online that is unprecedented. One of Facebook’s biggest successes – and a strategy Google has strictly enforced on Google+ – has been encouraging real names on to the site, making its network and data far more valuable. This is creating a living record, said Fischer, and building it in a meaningful way. “There’s no decision that a person takes in their lives that is not a better decision when it is informed by the people around them that they trust.”

Several hundred research scientists at Google are studying how web users access, interact with and share information. How will Google refine its mission of organising the world’s information? “We often see the future already exists in the present in some form, so the things just getting interesting now will be very important,” said Gomes.

He describes a relationship where users expect Google to synthesise answers from different sources to provide an expert response and expects the most noticeable changes to be made to the mobile homepage, which can take advantage of multiple sensors such as location to provide “richer interaction models”. That might include speech recognition – already vastly improved from even two years ago – and localised artificial intelligence that improves suggestions as it learns about the user.

Gomes claimed that instant access to information through Google has made conversations smarter, citing the time he went to see Kafka’s Metamorphosis and read up about the production. “My experience of the play was richer and I took away more because the combination of me plus the internet made me seem like someone who, in the past, would have been regarded as an expert. I became the kind of person I would previously have looked up to.”

Yet though Google and Facebook are both keen to burnish their scientific credentials, ultimately the real battle is over cold, hard cash. Google made 97% of its revenues, or $32.3bn, in the past 12 months from advertising. eMarketer, meanwhile estimates that Facebook’s largely ad-generated revenues will grow from $0.74bn in 2009 to $5.74bn in 2012 – yet the site has hardly begun rolling out truly personalised, targeted advertising. If there is any of Google’s lunch to be eaten, it is here.

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