Defeating online terrorism: Double-edged conundrum

LAST weekend’s riots in Charlottesville may have been encouraged, if only tacitly, by US president Donald Trump’s earlier ambivalence on the fascism alive in some American hearts, but they were made inevitable by the way our digital world eases communication and connects communities, no matter how hateful, by making geography redundant.

The opposite of that, thankfully, is also true. Within hours of the riots, the battle went digital. Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi website, was closed by its online host. Activists crowdsourced the process of identifying white men filmed beating a black man. The conduit that encouraged America’s nastiest nativists was also used to undo them.

The American fascists were following the example of