Raven: to Locate and Identify Online Extremist Multimedia

Exploitation of online social networks by terrorists and hate groups for propaganda, recruiting, and fund raising is a widely recognised national security problem. We propose an automated intelligent web crawling system called Raven to locate and identify online extremist multimedia. The Raven system consists of two main components: Muninn, a specialised web crawler, and Huginn, a machine learning layer. Muninn is an enhancement of an existing web crawler that was developed in a previous EPSRC project to find and download terrorist videos and store them securely. Huginn is the intelligent part of the system and the main innovation in the proposed project. Using deep learning techniques and written in Python, it is trained to recognise and analyse extremist multimedia and drive the Muninn crawling component to new web sites and Twitter/Telegram channels. While existing crawlers routinely analyse online extremist text, multimedia is much more challenging. Huginn will be initially trained with an existing video dataset and continually updated with additional videos that Muninn downloads. As the system sees more extremist multimedia, Muninn learns about more sources and Huginn becomes smarter and more accurate. Muninn and Huginn work together to aid companies, analysts, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and researchers to find and take down extremist multimedia on a faster and larger scale, in the face of agile terrorists and hate groups.