♪ - I run a company called Moonshot, and we deal with countering hate and violence and extremism online.

- [Hari] Vidhya Ramalingam founded Moonshot in 2015.

She's hoping her company will achieve a monumental goal, ending online hate and extremism through empathy and mental health support.

- I got into this through maybe a non-traditional path.

I had trained as an anthropologist, that was my undergraduate degree.

I was looking at people who are getting involved in white supremacist movements and hate movements.

And I thought, well, who's actually gonna talk to those people?

I started attending white nationalist rallies.

That was my starting point.

I just started turning up at events and I would stand in the back at first until I built up the courage to actually go up to people and ask them questions and start talking to them.

I wanted to know who they were, how they ended up in this worldview, what they were hoping to achieve.

It was a very strange experience and not an easy one.

I think especially as a woman of color, being in an environment where you're constantly surrounded by hate and I wouldn't say that I sympathized with them at all, but I started to empathize a little bit with how someone who had experienced everything in their lives might end up in this situation where they believed what they believed.

And I think actually that moment of humanizing the other for me, they were the other for me, they were people who I thought were monsters.

And all of a sudden I started to see them as human beings with sometimes actually very rational journeys into hate.

And that, for me, a light bulb went off because I thought okay, actually, if I can understand how someone could go down this path, then there's a chance at actually starting to understand when there might be moments where you could intervene.

And so what we are doing is trying to ensure anyone online who is interacting with hate, who's engaging with hate, who's seeking it out proactively that they are always offered a safer alternative.

- Moonshot develops an approach called the redirect method, using ads to steer online searches for hate to safer content.

So if I'm searching for a car on Google, there's gonna be a bunch of car companies trying to advertise to me.

If I'm searching for how to be a white nationalist or something hateful, what is a likely ad that I'm gonna see?

- So we ran ads that tested messages asking whether people were feeling angry.

We tested ads where we asked them are you feeling lonely and we also tested ads asking, are you feeling isolated?

They were by far and away the most effective ads that we ran as compared to every other ad that we tested trying different messaging tactics.

Once you get someone to actually click on the ad, the next step is to actually try and get them to engage with the service.

- In 2021, Moonshot estimates they disrupted more than 40,000 searches for dangerous content, leading to hundreds of one-on-one messages with at-risk users.

So what's interesting to me is that you are not trying to change their mind, per se, about what they're looking for.

- We are not here to be the thought police.

We're not here to tell people what they should or shouldn't believe.

This is just about understanding that if someone is engaging with incredibly violent content online or content that is affiliated with movements that incite violence, that we wanna ensure they have the opportunity to talk to someone.

- Have you seen patterns in the work that you've done with what happens online after a real world incident?

- After every incident that has happened in the US over the last five to seven years, we always see a spike in engagement with hate content.

I'll go back for a moment to 2017 when Charlottesville happened.

We tracked in the days immediately following the Charlottesville attack a 400% increase in attempts to access white supremacy content.

Over the last six years, we've tracked after almost every violent incident, we tracked a similar spike in activity.

And what really worries me about that is we don't necessarily always go back to the original baseline.

Year on year, we're seeing escalations in attempts to access this content, in the sharing and posting of this content and that's what worries me the most because we're seeing a kind of overall escalation year on year.

As of 2023, there's no longer this divide between the online and the offline space, right?

We all live and exist in both worlds.

And I think for far too long, we've used terms like keyboard warriors and talked about the digital spaces if it's completely divorced from reality.

Behind all of those data points online are human beings and we have to get at the human problem if we're ever gonna deal with this.

- So what is it that you've learned?

If you can distill, are there any commonalities?

Are there any similarities, whether you're working in Indonesia or whether you're working in Indianapolis about what drives people down these paths?

- I've spent my whole career working sometimes directly with people who are going down extremist paths and sometimes with people who have turned their lives around and now have left.

While there's no one story, there's no one path into extremism, the common theme and the common thread that really has stood out to me over the years is in almost every case, there's this desire to belong, to be a part of something, this need to be a part of something that's greater than themselves.

And you can add whatever layer on top of that in terms of ideology and the rationale, but ultimately, when you distill it down, it's about this emotional desire to be a part of something to belong and to be a part of something greater than oneself.

We need to be reaching people with something that they can not only engage with online, but potentially even offline, something they can engage with in the long run, something that will actually help them turn their lives around and that's a long term journey, not one that'll happen overnight.

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