Eli Lake, Columnist

If You Can't Beat ISIS Online, Ban 'Em

The U.S. government tried to troll radicals. Over at Google and YouTube, the private sector has another idea.

November 30, 2017 at 4:16 PM UTC

Eli Lake is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering national security and foreign policy. He was the senior national security correspondent for the Daily Beast and covered national security and intelligence for the Washington Times, the New York Sun and UPI.

1512057799_GettyImages-503572720 — Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg

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For much of the Obama presidency, the U.S. State Department waged a narrative war against the world's jihadists. Through a small office inside Foggy Bottom known as the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, a team of experts deployed counter-messages to al Qaeda and later the Islamic State.

As 2017 comes to a close, many fighting the online war for the hearts and minds of would-be terrorists are rethinking their strategy. Hearts and minds, of course, still matter. But the efforts of Western governments, academics and the private sector to craft clickable content and stories to discredit terrorists are often clumsy and slow. It's also difficult to measure just how effective these campaigns really are.