Countering Hate

Bob Pearson, Haroon K Ullah

• Publisher: 1845 Publishing
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780999662311
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología

We all start out the same. Whether born in Damascus or Detroit, human beings begin life with similar DNA, common instincts for survival and a basic desire to learn and explore.

So why do some young men and women grow up with plans to promote peace and prosperity, while others set out to harm or kill others? Every day we hear of people who try to disrupt our world, often violently. So what, exactly, is happening to our youth?

Extremists never stop trying to find the next young recruit. They are smarter, more technically savvy and better-organized than we give them credit for. What are they doing well and what can we learn from these insights? Are
we organized the right way to fight extremists? Are we thinking the right way? Are we basing decisions on the most effective models?

Pearson and Ullah join as co-authors to provide a mashup of their combined expertise — years of shaping behavior for the world’s top brands with years of countering terrorism.

Inspired by classes taught at the U.S. State Department on counterterrorism and dealing with disinformation campaigns, the authors have written a book that is part call to action and part innovation lab for those who want to make a difference. They are joined by a wide range of global leaders who provide their insights related to hate and extremism.

The book’s goal is to trigger new ideas on how leaders can partner worldwide to make our world a safer and more productive place over the long-term. One team, one world.

CHAPTER 1

THE EMERGENCE OF HATE

“Disruption is a process, not an event, and innovations can only be disruptive relative to something else.”

— CLAYTON M. CHRISTENSEN, author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”

Salman Taseer had just finished lunch with a friend in the Kohsar market district of Islamabad when a member of his own security team stepped forward and fired a machine gun at him from 10 feet away. Taseer, the governor of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, took at least 26 bullets and died on the spot. After he fell, his assassin, a young ex-military man named Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, set down the gun, raised his hands and asked his colleagues to arrest him. The others in Taseer’s security force obliged; none had fired a single shot in defense of the man they were hired to protect.

At the time, back in January 2011, Kohsar was a safe, middle-class neighborhood filled with cafes and stores, a popular destination in Pakistan’s capital city for locals and expatriates alike. But a change had come over the country in the years leading to Taseer’s death. Tragic assassinations and suicide bombings made more local headlines. The Pakistani government’s long-held dominance waned as more residents drifted toward hardline views. And in the country’s emerging political atmosphere, the motives behind Taseer’s murder seemed all too common. A prominent politician, a supporter of Pakistan’s democratization campaign, and a trusted adviser to Benazir Bhutto during her two terms as prime minister, Taseer never shied away from stating his beliefs that democracy and pluralism are inseparable and that all religious minorities should be allowed to vote in general elections — opinions antithetical to the positions of hardline Islamic fundamentalists. In more recent months, Taseer outraged his detractors by criticizing Pakistan’s strict new blasphemy laws, calling them unjust and indefensible and arguing minorities should not supplant the laws of the state.

Taseer was no stranger to the fact that his beliefs and views put him in danger, most notably from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. He received numerous death threats over the years, even served time in prison. At the time of his death, extremists held his son hostage in a Pakistani camp. Yet, he remained defiant, and publicly so. Just hours before his assassination, Taseer tweeted a line from Shakeel Badayuni, the Indian Urdu poet, that translated said: “My resolve is so strong that I do not fear the flames from without. I fear only the radiance of the flowers, that it might burn my garden down.”

The same social networks Taseer favored already had altered the political terrain in fundamental ways. Non-state actors used them to launch new offensives on the government, deploying a different set of ammunition, insurgency and tactics — a digital war on a digital battlefield. Long before his gruesome murder, and perhaps in ways he never recognized, Taseer became enmeshed in an online battle across various social media platforms, his avatar targeted with cyber weapons. Foes took short audio clips of his speeches out of context, cutting and packaging them for shares by key extremist influencers on Facebook and Twitter. Websites and blogs dedicated themselves to smearing him and others who the authors deemed to have “crossed the line.” Geolocation software tracked his movements in real time. Some non-state entities employed bots to retweet inflammatory content against him. And, in a few cases, TV networks carried some of the coverage and reported it online as “breaking news.”

The digital war for hearts and minds didn’t end with Taseer’s death, either. As shocking as the assassination was, the aftermath might have exceeded it. When Qadri, a member of the moderate Sufi organization Ahl-Sunnah Wa Jamaat, entered a courtroom days after gunning down Taseer, huge crowds cheered him and showered him with flowers. Fanboys hailed Qadri as a hero on websites and blogs, helping push him to the top of the Twitter trend rankings in the region. In the following weeks, Islamic confessional parties used social media to mobilize marches of up to 40,000 people, honoring Qadri’s “heroic” action and celebrating Taseer’s death. Even more disconcerting, moderate political leaders remained silent, issuing bland statements acknowledging Taseer’s passing and choosing not to speak out against the mass rallies in support of vigilante Islamism, lest their comments go viral and their families face the threats of the extremist mass. Indeed, the provincial court judge who found Qadri guilty of murder was forced to flee the country after his home address was posted online, and extremist groups successfully pressured the government to suspend the case against Qadri indefinitely.

Finally, after years of delays, a Pakistani court convicted Mumtaz Qadri of murder. He was hanged in February 2016, but he remains a hero and martyr to many. The tepid response of moderates and Taseer supporters could not stem the tide of extremist sentiment that washed across Pakistani social networks. Multiple videos of the speech that reportedly spurred Qadri to action remain on YouTube, collectively garnering hundreds of thousands of views as of October 2017.

The extremists already had gathered here, in the digital world, long before Qadri struck Taseer in that well-to-do Islamabad neighborhood. They stoked the fires, plotted their actions, and gathered their followers. They had already planned for a virtual beheading.

They’re still there today, celebrating their successes.

HATE IS A PROCESS

The bad news keeps coming. The fall of the World Trade Center buildings in New York City. Concert goers gunned down in Paris. A suicide bombing at a religious shrine in India. A gunman raining bullets on a country music festival in Las Vegas. We too often see the results of extreme hate in action. We live in a world filled with hate and bias. And while we, as a society, put on a strong show of outrage when confronted by it, we do a poor job of understanding how to identify and ameliorate hate before it reaches a violent conclusion.

As a result, we’ve spent years pondering the battle against extremism and violence, engaging it anew with every post-9/11 anthrax letter and each attack in London, Tel Aviv, Mumbai and beyond. Anger feels good as a first reaction; it might even provide a little comfort in the short-term. But we know full well it does little to offset the slow-burn of hate that coalesces over the long span of months and years. So we’re left with plenty of questions and not nearly enough answers. Why does this continue to occur? Who would feel so aggrieved that they would send a lethal white powder in an envelope or pack a box with nails and explosives? Who would decide to hate another group of people they never met, simply because they pray to a god of a different name? Who would knowingly recruit people to a cause with the hope that they would kill another human being?

After years of asking ourselves these same questions, we finally awakened to an incontrovertible reality: These questions, on their own, were far too shallow and vague to generate any truly useful answers. We needed a new way of thinking about hate and how to counter it. We needed a new model — in fact, a collection of models — that could help us find the roots of how hate develops and intervene before it bears its horrific fruit. So, we scoured our years of experience in international affairs, data analysis and crisis management. We pulled what we learned from leading diplomats, NGOs and experts who’ve grappled with the complex dynamics of hate and bias — from ISIS to Russian disinformation campaigns, from Sarajevo to Bamako. For many of these individual analysts and diplomats, the challenge felt unique and overwhelming. But emerging work in algorithmic analysis and data science, including W2O’s research in more than 20 languages worldwide, reveals far more commonality and similarity than any single perspective can show. The sophisticated models that analyze how we act online, what we search for to educate ourselves, or how we consume various forms of content all point to the fact that humans, across the globe, are far more similar and predictable than we like to believe.

For us, it suddenly became all to obvious: Hate does not form randomly. It builds through an accumulation of grievances, issues and life experiences. It’s a process — one we all brush up against at some point in our lives. It can be identified. It can be understood. It can be disrupted.

REACHING EVERYONE AT AN INDIVIDUAL LEVEL

Marketers love to segment groups of people. Whether isolating Baby Boomers from Gen X and Millennials, or zeroing in on a more precise target demographic, they relentlessly seek the largest audience of interest in their brand or message. Of course, most of them try to develop new, more effective ways of framing their customer base. For its part, W2O routinely creates new models to overhaul existing communications, marketing and digital practices, but it bases its approach to disruption on a proven model:

Status quo: Study how the status quo works. What do we do today?

Unmet needs: Identify the unmet needs which exist that aren’t being addressed

Pain points: What are people trying to do but can’t accomplish? What does our audience view as a pain point and why?

Model: What model can consistently identify those unmet needs and pain points, and then develop solutions that will work on a local level?

Scalability: Is the model usable anywhere in the world?

Simplicity: Is the model so simple that we think, “that’s obvious,” but for some reason never did it?

The framework itself seems simple enough, but simplicity underlies the success of some of the world’s most successful brands. (Steve Jobs’ exhortation to “do one thing well” comes to mind.) True to form, the models of today deliver powerful insights into the myriad markets W2O analyzes. But when applied to the concept of hate and how it develops, it revealed some major flaws in the methods we typically use to target an audience and influence their behavior. First, these strategies focus on a relatively short term, seeking to move people for a day, a week or a year. If you’re selling beer or laundry detergent, it’s perfect: focus on a finite period and increase sales. Second, current approaches too easily label people and groups, often in ways that are larger and more diverse than we realize. This is what we call the Gen du Jour approach, since there’s always another segmentation, and another after that, and so on. Third, because we rely on messaging and storytelling to reach people who already made up their minds, we have trouble breaking through and changing their narrative.

These approaches miss the central point of how we guide other people toward a lifetime of shared humanity. No company says: “We’d like to reach our customers 20 years before they buy our product. We want to build a great relationship and know how to meet each other’s needs from the time they are born to the time of their first experience with us.” Yet, when attempting to counter hate, that’s exactly what we try to do. We need a set of models that feature a long-term scope, reach everyone on an individual level, and deliver a story of hope long before they latch tightly on a message of hate.

VULNERABILITY AND THE FOUR STAGES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Nancy Zwiers paced the room, the fifty public affairs leaders from NATO and various State Department posts listening intently — and, perhaps, a little quizzically. One could excuse their skepticism. After all, when they gathered that day at the U.S. Marketing College at the George P. Shultz National Foreign Affairs Training Center in Arlington, Virginia, they probably didn’t expect to learn about how kids played with Barbie dolls.

Zwiers, one of the world’s leading marketing minds, trained at Procter & Gamble before moving into multiple executive positions at Mattel, where she led worldwide marketing for the company’s $2 billion Barbie doll brand. She now serves as CMO at Spin Master, where she works on products ranging from Air Hogs to Hedbanz. Few people on the planet know as much as Zwiers’ does about the role of play in a child’s development. By analyzing huge amounts of data and research, she developed her theory of “core play patterns.” These patterns, consistent across time, geography and culture, come from the inside out. They represent a biological drive — and if you tap into it, you have a much better chance of engaging kids...