The Impact of Counter-Narratives Insights from a year-long cross-platform pilot study of counter-narrative curation, targeting, evaluation and impact
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The concept of creating counter-narratives1 in order to push back against extremist recruitment and propaganda has become well established in recent years. In practice, however, it has proven difficult to curate this content in a systematic way, target it toward at risk audiences, and – most importantly – measure constructive impact on their behaviour.Over the past few years, the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) has developed research and pilot studies conducted with the Against Violent Extremism (AVE) network of former extremists and survivors of extremism that it manages. This research has been conducted in order to test and improve methodologies that help optimise the impact of counter-narrative campaigns. This report presents the development, deployment, and evaluation of three counter-narrative campaigns orchestrated by AVE and Jigsaw (an incubator within Alphabet that uses technology to address geopolitical issues) with additional in-kind and financial support from Facebook and Twitter. This project builds on the findings of a previous counter-narrative pilot project conducted in 2014 and attempts to find ways to achieve greater scale, authenticity, efficiency, reach, and impact.