Your Nation's Attention for the Price of a Used Car — with Zahed Amanullah

Today’s extremists don’t need highly produced videos like ISIS.
They don’t need deep pockets like Russia. With the right message,
a fringe organization can reach the majority of a nation’s
Facebook users for the price of a used car. Our guest, Zahed
Amanullah, knows this firsthand. He’s a counter-terrorism expert
at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, and when his
organization received $10,000 in ad credits from Facebook for an
anti-extremism campaign, they were able to reach about two-thirds
of Kenya’s Facebook users. It was a surprising win for Zahed, but
it means nefarious groups all over the African continent have
exactly the same broadcasting power. Last year, Facebook took
down 66 accounts, 83 pages, 11 groups and 12 Instagram accounts
related to Russian campaigns in African countries, and Russian
networks spent more than $77,000 on Facebook ads in Africa. Today
on the show, Zahed will explain how the very tools that
extremists use to broadcast messages of hate can also be used to
stop them in their tracks, and he’ll tell us what tech and
government must do to systematically counter the problem. “If we
don’t get in front of this,” he says, “this phenomenon is going
to amplify beyond our reach.“