Countering terrorist propaganda: Competitive resource allocation to communities

Abstract

Increased terrorist propaganda has caused greater violence worldwide. Communities are efficient channels through which terrorist organizations can access target audiences; thus, communities are playing larger roles in terrorist propaganda distribution. However, no previous studies have examined the interactions between terrorists and governments regarding terrorist propaganda in communities from a game-theoretic lens. This article aims to fill this research gap. We first classify the relationships between the communities as independent or interactive. For both cases, we describe the process of terrorist propaganda distribution in communities, highlighting the dependence of the degree of terrorist ideology within a community on the terrorist-organization and government resource allocations; based on this, we build novel sequential game models of the terrorist and the government and obtain the equilibrium solutions. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative study to elucidate the differences in the expected government losses for independent and interactive communities. The outcomes are as follows: (i) the higher the community propagation centrality, the greater the resource expenditure of the government and terrorist organization, and (ii) introducing an interaction network among communities decreases the expected government loss when the network directly destroys the distribution uniformity of the community propagation centralities. Finally, we present a case study to illustrate the usability of the proposed models. This study provides novel insights for governments targeting optimal allocation of intervention resources to communities so as to counter terrorist propaganda distributed by a strategic terrorist.