They're Recruiting Our 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 replacing older systems before they fully form, such as mobile payments, mobile networks, and streaming. Since Covid-19, behavior-level leapfrogging has emerged, where algorithms replace social graphs, gaming platforms replace traditional social environments, and generative AI reduces barriers between languages and audiences. This compresses how people discover, evaluate, and act, and businesses seek to shorten marketing funnels and sales cycles. Extremist groups have applied the same logic by engineering continuous experiences that compress exposure, trust, and commitment. Radicalization stages that once followed a step-by-step sequence are now compressed, increasingly affecting children, with data showing a significant share of terrorism-related arrests involving under-18s in the UK.

Read at The Cipher Brief