Internet-Supported Recruitment of Terrorist Organizations: An Analysis of the Early Stages of the Recruitment Process and Countermeasures to Prevent Terrorist Recruitment

Yıl 2022, Sayı: 16, 35 - 69, 31.12.2022

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Öz

Terrorism is one of the most critical threats to the stability of democratic societies. It seeks to achieve its political goals by undermining public trust in governments and instilling fear in society. Terrorist organizations need weapons and money for the continuity of their activities and to achieve their goals. However, terrorist organizations that do not have sufcient and qualied human resources are destined to disappear. For this reason, terrorist organizations adapted their recruitment processes to the rapid developments in internet-based technologies, and especially by using online social networks, gained signicant momentum in their activities. They use internet-based technologies to help their traditional recruitment processes. By reorganizing their recruitment methods, all citizens of the world become their target audience. Moreover, they now carry out their recruitment processes more condentially and faster than before, thanks to the communication opportunities provided by internet-based technologies. This study examines how terrorist organizations perform their internet-supported recruitment process, what tools they use, and how the authorities can combat the recruitment of terrorist organizations by intervening in the early stages of the process. In the introduction part of the study, the relationship between terrorism, the media, and the internet are analyzed from a historical perspective to understand the recruitment process better. The second part examines the internet-supported recruitment process with its stages and the internet-based tools used in the process. It will also be mentioned that throughout the study, the internet-supported recruitment process is not dened as a different process from traditional recruitment but as complementary to each other. The last part analyzes how the human resources of terrorism can be rendered dysfunctional with countermeasures and practices developed at the initial stage of the internet-supported recruitment process, in which the bond between recruiters and potential candidates is not strengthened and is not condential yet. As a result, this research essentially aims to reveal that the human resources of terrorist organizations can be weakened much more effectively with the national and international countermeasures and practices taken at the very beginning of the internet-supported recruitment process

Anahtar Kelimeler

terrorism, internet suported, recruitment, social networks