In the United States, extremist groups are taking advantage of the current disarray in social media to spread their violent ideologies, according to a recent report and security specialists. They caution that this issue is no longer confined to foreign terrorist organizations but is a growing domestic concern.

Research conducted by the Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University, titled “Digital Aftershocks: Online Mobilization and Violence in the United States,” highlights how the online presence of violent Islamist factions has diminished. This reduction is attributed to the effectiveness of terrorist designations coupled with platform enforcement, which has successfully driven these extremists into less visible parts of the internet, thereby curbing their ability to recruit and disseminate propaganda.

The report notes, however, that the same legal mechanisms are not applied to domestic extremist groups. This discrepancy, described as an “enforcement asymmetry,” allows far-right, far-left, nihilistic, and antisemitic groups to flourish on mainstream social media platforms without similar constraints.

In the image provided by Reuters/Jim Bourg, Antifa members are seen marching during a rally in Washington on August 12, 2018, marking the one-year anniversary of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” protests.

Dr. Casey Babb, a professor specializing in terrorism and the director of the Promised Land Project at Canada’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute, shared with Fox News Digital that lawmakers already possess the necessary authority to address and mitigate the threat of domestic extremism.

“Despite the First Amendment, and, of course, some of this is in a gray zone, but not all speech is protected,” Babb said. “There are already tools there that enable policymakers, law enforcement, intelligence agencies and so on to crack down on domestic extremists.” “Statements that are intended to provoke unlawful action, incitement, that’s not protected speech. Or statements where the person making [them] intensely communicate[s] some sort of intent to commit an unlawful act or violence, or says something that could be perceived as a legitimate threat, that’s not protected.”

The NYU report mirrors that frustration, concluding that the U.S. has “ample tools” to confront extremism but applies them unevenly. It found that when foreign terrorist designations restrict groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, their online reach collapses.

“The ability to designate organized nations and individuals as terrorist entities is a very useful tool,” Babb said. “It’s a tool that policymakers should really lean into and think about, possibly modernizing and reforming to better address a lot of what we’re seeing domestically.”

Babb said extremists are “learning from one another,” adopting propaganda and recruitment methods once pioneered by Islamist organizations.

“Groups like ISIS, al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood were some of the early adopters of these platforms,” he said. “They recognized many, many years ago the power of these social-media outlets to recruit, to disseminate harmful messaging and to really undermine the populations that they target.”

Antifa protesters in Portland, Oregon, on June 19, 2019. (Moriah Ratner/Stringer)

He also blamed social-media companies for enabling the spread of hate.

“There’s frankly no reason that I should be seeing much of what I’m seeing online,” Babb said. “Free speech is one thing; giving a platform for nefarious state and non-state actors to spread divisive language deliberately with the intent of dividing Americans and endangering certain minorities, that’s something else entirely. These platforms reward outrage and they reward divisive content. A lot of people are monetizing this.”

“You shouldn’t be making thousands of dollars a month by spreading the same messages that Adolf Hitler or Yahya Sinwar would spread,” he added.

WATCH: Trump takes Antifa fight abroad with foreign terrorist designation

President Trump once floated designating Antifa a domestic terrorist group, an idea Babb believes deserves renewed attention.

“Designation opens a whole suite of tools,” he said. “It makes adversaries’ lives much more difficult.”

The Digital Aftershocks report concludes that U.S. policymakers and tech platforms must coordinate more aggressively to combat online extremism.