Students vs. Extremism.

• Position: NATIONAL SECURITY - Brief article

The U.S. government's newest weapon in the fight against terrorism? It's not a high-tech drone or an elite combat unit--it's social-media-savvy college students. Countering extremism online is a priority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), with groups like ISIS increasingly recruiting on the internet. In fact, hundreds of Americans are suspected of joining ISIS in recent years, and many of them were radicalized online. In a competition called Peer to Peer: Challenging Extremism, DHS gave students at dozens of universities up to $2,000 to develop social media campaigns to counter online extremism. In July, DHS awarded students at the University of Maryland first place and...