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Facebook, YouTube and Twitter were warned about an insidious new form of online extremism on Capitol Hill as they sought to push back on the notion that they aren’t doing enough to rid their platforms of terrorists and hate-filled content.
Clint Watts, a senior fellow at George Washington University’s Center for Cyber and Homeland Security, told lawmakers that the U.S. is facing a unique type of threat he dubbed “Anwar Awlaki meets PizzaGate.” Watts’s idea, referencing the U.S.-born militant, is that in the future, someone could combine the social media prowess displayed by Islamic State with the bizarre case of a man who, believing the debunked PizzaGate conspiracy peddled online, brandished a gun inside a Washington, D.C. pizza shop.
“The greatest concern moving forward might likely be a foreign intelligence service, posing as Americans on social media, infiltrating one or both political extremes in the U.S. and then recruiting unwitting Americans to undertake violence against a target of the foreign power’s choosing,” Watts said in his prepared testimony.