“After the attacks in Munich and Villach, the authorities are investigating the perpetrators' Internet accounts. There are indications of Islamist motives. Extremists have long been radicalizing themselves on the Internet and developing their own ideology from fragments… Experts have been pointing out for years that more and more people are becoming radicalized online . "In the past, if someone became radicalized by Islam, they would go to backyard mosques, prayer groups or attend some kind of secret extremist meeting. That's no longer necessary today. You can become radicalized online and don't really need a social environment anymore," says Hans-Jakob Schindler from the Counter Extremism Project.”

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Ive yet to meet an oncologist, thank God. But if I did turn up to be told I had cancer I wouldn’t expect him to start treating me with a chainsaw. That was my thought this morning when I read that our national counter-terrorism chief had described the effect of exposing kids to violent content online as carcinogenic. Matt Jukes, Asistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations for the Met Police, suggested that a ban on social media for the under 16s was a way to address the scourge of adolescent maniacs mobilised by online extremism who turn hateful thought into lethal action."

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy writes: "Really, Prevent’s statistics tell us more about those making the referrals than they do about the nature of the terror threat to Britain. Prevent uses the public sector — especially education — as its main vector of delivery, which will always skew referrals towards the kinds of people with whom those institutions and services interact. This has led to confusion and mission creep even among Prevent practitioners who, as William Shawcross warned in his 2023 review of Prevent, have viewed terroristic radicalisation primarily through a lens of vulnerability."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Violent extremism has the power to disfigure society and rob people of their personal security. We can address this problem but only if we equip our prisons to be places with the time, space and tools to challenge the scourge of ideologically motivated offending. And, of course, only if the supply of new recruits is stopped at source."

"Liam Duffy, an adviser to the Counter Extremism Project, said Islamist extremists should be perceived as 'more than a terrorist threat'. He said the UK should not fall into complacency despite no deaths from terrorism being recorded last year. 'There are long, long periods between terrorist attacks, between recruitment flows to overseas conflicts, where to our eyes nothing happens,' he said. 'But that’s not the case. There is a lot happening and we need to know what is happening.'"

CEP Strategic Advisor Liam Duffy: "It’s a question both implicit and explicit in much of the coverage since the night of 22nd May 2017. It’s a question explored by Sir John Saunders in his Manchester Arena bombing inquiry, published yesterday. The conventional answer is that suicide bomber, Salman Abedi, was radicalised. But what if he wasn’t radicalised – at least not in the way we understand?"