Complex Project to Develop Real Tools for Identifying and Countering Terrorism: Real-time Early Detection and Alert System for Online Terrorist Content Based on Natural Language Processing, Social Network Analysis, Artificial Intelligence and Complex Event Processing

Abstract

In the last decades, the importance of social media has increased extremely with the creation of new communication channels and even changing the way people are communicating. These trends came along with the disadvantage of allowing a new scenario where messages containing valuable data about critical threats like terrorism and criminal activity are ignored, due to the sheer inability to process – much less analyze – the vast amount of available data. Terrorism has a very real and direct impact on basic human rights of victims, such as the right to life, liberty and physical integrity, often with devastating consequences. \n \nIn this context, the RED-Alert project was designed to build a complete software toolkit to support LEAs in the fight against the use of social media by terrorist organizations for conducting online propaganda, fundraising, recruitment and mobilization of members, planning and coordination of actions, as well as data manipulation and misinformation. The project aims to cover a wide range of social media channels used by terrorist groups to disseminate their content which will be analysed by the RED-Alert solution to support LEAs to take coordinated action in real time but having as a primordial condition preserving the privacy of citizens.