Assessing Outcomes of Online Campaigns Countering Violent Extremism: A Case Study of the Redirect Method
Online counter-extremism campaigns have proliferated, but evaluators still struggle to measure whether they work. This RAND report reviews the field and applies it to the Redirect Method, which uses targeted ads to divert users searching for violent jihadist or far-right content toward counter-narrative videos. Click-through rates met industry benchmarks, and the far-right arm drew far more impressions than the jihadist arm—a telling signal about the relative size of those sympathizer pools in the U.S. But like nearly every CVE evaluation to date, the analysis stops at reach and engagement, leaving the harder question untouched: did anyone's attitudes actually shift? Closing that gap, the report argues, will require closed evaluation designs, A-B testing, comment analysis, and bringing former extremists in to judge whether the content lands with its intended audience.