DHS launches warning system to find domestic terrorism threats on public social media

The focus is not on the identity of the posters but rather on gleaning insights about potential security threats based on emerging narratives and grievances. So far, DHS is using human beings, not computer algorithms, to make sense of the data, the officials said. "We're not looking at who are the individual posters," said a senior official involved in the effort. "We are looking at what narratives are resonating and spreading across platforms. From there you may be able to determine what are the potential targets you need to protect."... Concerns about government intrusion on free speech are legitimate, said Oren Segal, vice president of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation League, but the government can hardly ignore the main vector of extremist communication in the U.S. "As a way to gauge potential threats, potential narratives that animate people to action, the online space is where that's at," he said. "This is why the insurrection was predictable from our point of view, because the planning and the organizing was happening in plain site. ... This is not an easy issue, but one thing we can all agree on is that in order to get ahead of the next threat, you need to go into the spaces in which the extremists are present."