In September 2022, ICSVE and Ampliva launched a Meta advertising campaign in the Middle East and North Africa with the goal of increasing website traffic to a series of resources on TheRealJihad.org among adults 18-40 people in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen.
The International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism (ICSVE) is an action-based, interdisciplinary research center working on psychosocial, cultural, political, economic, ideological and technological topics impacting global peace and security. ICSVE operates TheRealJihad.org which debunks various aspects of militant jihadist claims through a series of videos titled; “Breaking the ISIS Brand Counter Narrative” and more than 20 blog posts.
To capture the attention of people susceptible to extremism, ICSVE documented an emotionally evocative counter-narrative interview featuring a 23-year-old Iraqi man speaking about the atrocities ISIS committed against innocent Iraqi civilians. They used this interview to create a short video ad and paired the video with the caption “After watching this video please share your thoughts on “is keeping your promises Islamic?” What if your “state” did not keep its promises – is it following Islam?” to encourage commenting on the post to collect qualitative information on the audience.
As a result, ICSVE and Ampliva drove more than 163,000 people to TheRealJihad.org and analyzed more than 1,200 comments on the ads. The most important qualitative finding was that the majority of commenters seemed to have understood the intent of the counter- narrative video and TheRealJihad.org.
