The New Extremist Recruitment Funnel Starts With Children

"Technology has a way of helping us skip steps. China skipped mass adoption of credit cards and went straight to mobile payments. Nigeria bypassed landlines and went directly to mobile networks. Indonesia moved past cable and into streaming. That's infrastructure leapfrogging-when entire systems evolve because a better alternative arrives before the old one fully forms."

"Since Covid-19, we've seen a different kind of leapfrog-one that operates at the level of behavior, not infrastructure. TikTok replaced the social graph with the algorithm. Gaming platforms replaced traditional social environments. And generative AI has removed the barriers between languages, domains and audiences. The result is a compression of how people discover, evaluate, and act."

"In the business world, we are always wondering how we can compress the marketing funnel. Can we move through the phases of awareness, consideration, evaluation, and purchase faster? With AI, we can as sales cycles that took months can now happen in days. Wonderful. Unfortunately, extremist groups have come to the same conclusion."

"They are no longer pursuing recruits step-by-step over time. That's old school. They are engineering systems that compress exposure, trust, and commitment into a single, continuous experience-one that increasingly begins and ends with children. The data reflects the shift. In 2024, the UK reported that one in five terrorism-related arrests was for a young person under age 18."

Technology has enabled infrastructure leapfrogging by adopting newer systems before older ones fully form. Since Covid-19, behavior-level leapfrogging has emerged, where algorithms, gaming platforms, and generative AI reduce barriers between people and content. This compresses how individuals discover, evaluate, and act, and businesses seek to shorten the marketing funnel and sales cycles. Extremist groups have adopted the same approach by engineering continuous systems that compress exposure, trust, and commitment. Recruitment increasingly begins and ends with children. Data from the UK shows a large share of terrorism-related arrests involve under-18s, beyond what detection alone explains. Traditional radicalization stages are no longer sequential and instead occur in compressed form.

Read at The Cipher Brief