Back before Big Tech cracked the whip on jihadis and their online fanboys, it wasn’t uncommon for journalists and analysts to interact directly with terrorists in distant war zones, even building something of a rapport. The bizarre tension of these interactions, between battle-hardened religious fanatics and those on the other side of their celestial war, was not lost on terrorism scholar J.M. Berger. Describing his virtual relationship with an American al-Shabaab fighter, he noted how it became “part of my daily routine… to check in with a terrorist with a professed love of al-Qaida in Somalia on the other side of the world.”

Jihadist groups recognised the enormous and unprecedented potential reach that social media afforded. Posts by Isis fighters formed part of a deliberate grassroots strategy to flood the internet with unofficial propaganda to complement the organisation’s glossier official output.

Initially, Western security services were indulgent toward the tweeting terrorists, thanks largely to the treasure trove of intel they provided. Jihadist recruits would post photographs with easily geolocatable features — treelines, ridges, hills and apartment buildings — and pose for selfies that would haunt them in court many months or years later. Posts also provided valuable insights into internal dynamics and even instability within terrorist groups. The American in al-Shabaab live-tweeted his dispute with the organisation’s mainly Somali leadership, a dispute which ended in his eventual assassination. Leaving jihadis online, it was argued, left them right where we could see them.

The summer of 2014 changed all that.

In June that year, Isis easily overran Mosul — and the US trained and equipped Iraqi forces defending it — and declared a caliphate. This declaration transformed the trickle of foreign fighters joining the group (now a quasi-state) into a flood. In the weeks that followed, “Isis Twitter” was drunk on battlefield triumphalism, apocalypticism and a catalogue of pornographic violence — violence that was “instantly accessible at the click of a mouse.”

Despite a litany of other atrocities, it was the filmed execution of American reporter James Foley in August that prompted decisive action. Here was an act so monstrous, and with such reach, that social media companies changed their content moderation policies almost overnight. “We have been and are actively suspending accounts as we discover them related to this graphic imagery. Thank you”, tweeted Twitter CEO Dick Costolo the morning after a video of the beheading was posted online. Facebook took similar action, mere months after defending its decision to leave videos of cartel atrocities online.

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Jihadis had beheaded victims on camera before, but never in such high definition and never at the hands of a masked executioner with an unmistakable British accent. (The killer, nicknamed “Jihadi John” by the press, was later revealed to be a London-raised IT salesman named Mohammed Emwazi.) Perhaps the accent was the decisive element which prompted such a response: instead of violence between distant and unfamiliar people, the killer was one of our own. And, unlike the terrorist spectacle of 9/11, the sickening act of decapitating helpless captives represented what the philosopher Adriana Cavarero has described as horrorism: “An ontological crime well beyond the inflicting of death.”

Revisiting the commentary in the days that followed is like peering through a window to another planet. The New Yorker asked “Should Twitter Have Taken Down the James Foley Video?”, while Slate ran the headline: “Did Twitter and YouTube Make the Right Call in Suppressing Images of James Foley’s Beheading?” Both explored the possible consequences of the companies adopting editorial control.

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At the same time, Western governments were leaning heavily into the narrative that the exodus of their own citizens to the newly declared caliphate was a product of gruesome Isis propaganda. Tech companies sought to deflect mounting pressure from governments over terrorist content, but they could not outright reject the charge that their platforms were influencing minds and behaviour — it is central to their ad-based business model.

Government concern over online radicalisation and the loose changed tech companies deigned to throw at initiatives countering it fostered the emergence of an online extremism industry. Despite its efforts, a considerable radicalisation has since taken place — a radicalisation not of large numbers of internet users transformed into terrorists by social media, but of the entire discourse on online terrorism and the field it sustained.

The response to Jihadi John’s campaign of choreographed butchery set the precedent that tech companies could be pressured and shamed into censoring extremist content. Since then, the number of people and groups who’ve come under the microscope of online extremism entrepreneurs has dramatically expanded, as has the list of ideologies deemed near-terroristic.

Sexless men on the internet are the next great terror threat. Criticising immigration policy is mainstreaming the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. Gender critical feminists are peddling hate. Millions of Americans are in fact, “mass radicalised”. Free speech itself is a far-Right talking point. Critics of Covid lockdowns were spreading misinformation and making bedfellows of the far-Right. As terrorism scholar Simon Cottee put it, “Nobody in this game, if we’re honest, has an interest in seeing radicalisation go away. It’s bad for business. We need radicalised people, and if we can’t find them, we’ll invent them.”

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It used to be that “radicalisation” meant the process that led individuals to kill for politics. But, responsive to the latest controversies and funding incentives of the day, it has expanded to cover broader concepts such as “hate”, “mis/disinformation”, “harm” and more, dangerously blurring the lines between political debate and counter-terrorism. This confusion was helped along by the narrative of resurgent fascism that accompanied the populist victories of 2016. In some counter-extremism circles, Brexit and Trump could be mentioned in the same breath as the present-day genocidaires of Isis.

If this list of new extremists and terrorists sounds like a list of progressive bogeymen, it is. The constellation of extremism NGOs and academic centres fill their rosters from social classes where certain interests, prejudices and worldviews are near hegemonic. Those interests happen to strongly overlap with the incumbent governments in both Canada and the United States, who are of course content for likeminded organisations to define who is an extremist and who is an upstanding citizen deserving of an online presence.

This political alignment grants access to funding opportunities, as well as platforms in a sympathetic media environment, for progressive extremism experts, who can in turn paint targets for politically sympathetic moderators in Silicon Valley and pressure them to act.

The threat to free speech and civil liberties posed by this arrangement should be obvious to all but the most partisan. This is not just a cheap pop at progressivism. It should barely need saying that the danger would be just as real if the industries at hand were dominated by conservatives and if conservatives ruled the roost in Ottawa and D.C. But at present, they aren’t and don’t.

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Nor is it enough to point out that the Big Tech companies are private. As free speech guru Jacob Mchangama has observed of the major social media platforms: “No government in history has ever been able to exert such extensive control over what is being said, read, and shared by so many people across the world and in real time.” These platforms are the public square now; upstart competitors are liable to be crushed, sometimes under political and media pressure amid accusations of extremism.

It seems unlikely Elon Musk will be reinstating Isis Twitter on free speech grounds. But today, the legitimate debate on how far platforms should go in response to online extremism is less likely to focus on Jihadi John’s beheading videos than on Joe Rogan’s podcast or a contrarian Substack. The historian of populism Thomas Frank summed up the dominant attitude among his fellow liberals: “The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an ‘extremism expert’ shushing the world.”

As the recent jihadist assassination of David Amess MP shows, even with actual attacks, our culture seems unable to process terrorism through any lens other than an immediate clamour for greater online controls and censorship. Eight years after Isis splattered blood and gore across social media, we still need real expertise and study of extremist and terrorist groups. What we do not need is an industry laundering censorious agendas as impartial expertise, enforcing partisan truths to combat disinformation, or managing public debate under the guise of counter-terrorism.

Today, with most Western countries reverting to type and responding to jihadist terror with obscurantism and denial, it looks like far fewer people were Charlie than was actually claimed. Not so in France, though, which is more or less united behind President Macron’s decision to confront the country’s domestic Islamist movement. In one poll at the end of last year, a staggering 79% of French citizens agreed that “Islamism has declared war on the Republic”.

To his critics, Macron’s hard line was a cynical manoeuvre designed to reduce the electoral threat to his right posed by Marine Le Pen and National Rally. But such a claim ignores the threat that Islamism does pose to France. It is also to misread who is directing the country’s conversation on extremism. For the truth is that the impetus behind France’s skirmish with Islamism doesn’t come from the Right, but from the Left.

This shift did not happen overnight. Way back in 2002, the left-wing feminist collective Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Whores Nor Submissives) was founded following a series of high-profile organised gang rapes known as tournantes – or “pass-arounds”. They soon became vocal advocates against escalating misogyny and violence against women. But they were particularly concerned with the French authorities’ empowerment of Islamist and Salafist groups to tackle the social ills of drugs and crime, which to the feminists culminated in an Islamist culture of sexual repression, misogyny and extremism.

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This was famously attempted in the commune of Trappes, some 30km from Paris, where the Salafist community was enlisted to steer young members away from criminality and delinquency. One resident gushingly described how “mothers saw their children return to religious practice. It was a relief.” By 2013, however, it became starkly clear that this experiment in activist Salafism had all but failed. Trappes was seized by religious rioting and the commune set an ignominious national record in sending 80 jihadist recruits to Syria. At the time, Ni Putes was denounced for being “Islamophobic”. But, if anything, the riots acted as a vindication of their warning.

Yet Ni Putes was hardly an isolated example, a fringe outlier on the peripheries of French debate. In the same year as its launch, a collection of essays titled Les Territoires Perdus de la Republique, or The Lost Territories of the Republic, was published, which warned of rising antisemitism and radicalisation among second and third generation Muslims. In the book, a number of schoolteachers – those tasked not just with imparting knowledge, but the values of the Republic – pointed out that classrooms were disintegrating along ethnic and religious lines, that the ideals of secularism and universalism were facing an unprecedented challenge.

That isn’t to say that the teachers’ sense of urgency — or that of Ni Putes — was widely shared on the Left, or even the centre. In fact, as late as 2014, national discussion surrounding Islamism was still, to an extent, plagued by cringe-inducing naivety. In April of that year, journalist David Thomson appeared on a typically French news programme to assess the steady exodus of jihadist recruits to ISIS’s nightmarish project in Iraq and Syria. Thomson, who by this point had interviewed dozens of French jihadis, calmly explained that that French jihadis see France as a legitimate target, as an “enemy of Allah”.

For this now painfully obvious insight, Thomson was humiliated on national television. Facing the indignation of seven panellists and a presenter, the journalist – barely allowed to finish a sentence – was accused of “populism” and “stigmatising” French Muslims, while other guests drew comparisons between ISIS recruits and the anti-fascist volunteers of the Spanish Civil War. Of course, France was a target. And an honest attempt to understand Islamism and its militant jihadi offshoots would have made this clear. As one anonymous imprisoned jihadi made clear recently: “France is a symbol, an enemy. If you can push it into a civil war, if you’re able to make France lose its strength, its social contract, then you will have an open door to a victory in Europe.”

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It wasn’t long before Thomson’s every word proved correct: just one month later, a Frenchman fresh from the Syrian jihad, Mehdi Nemmouche, gunned down four people at the Jewish Museum of Brussels. Later, between the attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January 2015 and the assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in July 2016, jihadists would kill a total of 239 people in France. Thomson, for his troubles, ended up on a jihadi kill-list and went into hiding.

For much of the French centre and liberal-left, afflicted by what Thomson labelled “jihadoscepticism”, the attacks proved a rude awakening. In particular, the shootings at Charlie Hebdo’s offices struck at the core of the French Left’s secular, anti-clerical values. (Despite the British media’s portrayals of the magazine as Islamophobic and racist, it sits firmly within the traditions of the Left.)

Since then, every section of French political society has woken up to the threat of Islamism. Just as with Ni Putes’s vindication, one of the contributors to The Lost Territories, a history teacher named Iannis Roder, has found himself exonerated and thrust into the public eye. The decision to invite him to deliver a Ted Talk in 2017 signalled his total rehabilitation by the liberal professional classes. To this day, Roder still challenges the escalation of classroom “separatism” through an influential left-leaning think tank, Fondation Jean-Jaurès.

More significantly, a raft of left-wing commentators and politicians have stepped into the rhetorical and ideological territory carved out by Ni Putes and others. Then Prime Minister Manuel Valls adopted a firmer stance than his fellow socialists on security, secularism and Islamism, though he paid for it electorally. Journalist Caroline Fourest and Marianne magazine, firmly of the Left, became fierce and fearless public advocates against Islamism, while prominent socialist voices such as Gilles Clavreul and Laurent Bouvet offer full-throated criticism of the far-left’s indulgence of it.

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Even the academics have got on board. Echoing the explosive 2002 essay collection, leading scholar Bernard Rougier published Les Territoires Conquis d’Islamisme, or The Territories Conquered by Islamism, detailing the growth of Islamist movements of France – and, more importantly, where Islamists have become the de facto local authorities. Soon, long-held truisms about the socioeconomic causes of radicalisation were subjected to rigorous questioning, exemplified in the work of Hugo Micheron. Why, for instance, does Trappes hold the record for jihadist foreign fighters but a neighbouring commune with the same socioeconomic profile account for zero? What made the tiny affluent Southern town of Lunel “the capital of French jihad”, but Marseille, a big city with its own share of social ills, immune to the lure of extremism?

Crucially, all of these developments have taken place in the mainstream. A culture of public intellectualism sees those such as Roder, Thomson, Fourest, Rougier and Micheron on TV shows and in newspapers in a way that their British colleagues might only find themselves in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. It’s a refreshing reminder that the West’s understanding of Islamism doesn’t have to be hampered by political tribalism: for the Left in Britain, the cause is Western foreign policy; for the average liberal-minded academic, it’s economic and social marginalisation; while for the far-right and certain sections of the Right, Islam is to blame.

In recent years in France, though, the centre-left has shed this deadweight and articulated arguments against Islamism and for the values of the Republic. Yes, the far-left remains obsessed with “anti-imperialism” and identity politics. But there can be no doubt that those not on the fringes now focus on the political dimensions of Islamism, without implicating ordinary French Muslims in the manner of the far-right.

That is particularly important, as few things have boosted the Western far-right like the perception that the establishment is unwilling to confront the thorny issues of the day. Yet in France – and perhaps there is a lesson in this for us in Britain – the Left and the centre are pulling the rug from beneath the far-right’s feet. It follows that the former darling of centrist liberals, Emmanuel Macron, has been on the very same intellectual journey. The only question for France remains whether or not this is too little, too late.