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Article

Can We Win the War

Against ISIS by Focusing

on Social Media?

JM Berger

For a forthcoming study Policy and public activism have suspension of some accounts, it is
commissioned by Google Ideas, JM followed the flow of ISIS media, with still substantial, likely generating more
Berger and his colleague set up a organised campaigns to seek the than 200,000 tweets per day. ISIS
system to track pro-ISIS messaging suspension of supporters’ Twitter users are also found on Facebook, but
on social media. Berger recently accounts, and more dramatically, reliable numbers are unavailable.
testified before the Foreign Affairs a White House summit devoted to Some of these social media accounts
Committee in the US House of countering violent extremism (CVE) belong to users based in Iraq and
Representatives about their findings. by countering ISIS’s narratives and Syria, who are card-carrying members
The study will be published by the recruitment online. The West is of ISIS. Others are supporters spread
Brookings Institution’s Project on US weary of the exigencies of war on the out around the world, with varying
Relations with the Islamic World in ground. Some hope that fighting the degrees of involvement with the
early March. battle on social media will be enough. formal organisation.
In the public eye, ISIS’s online There are targets in abundance. ‘Twitter initially resisted becoming
messaging operations have eclipsed In a forthcoming study from the values police, but the spree of
its military operations on the ground. Brookings Institution, co-author beheadings changed that.’
Its massacres of hundreds of Iraqis Jonathon Morgan and I estimate ISIS uses its presence online to
and Syrians ‘off-screen’ yield relatively that at least 46,000 Twitter accounts communicate, both internally and
few headlines compared to the were being used to support ISIS in externally, with a key goal of projecting
smaller number of murders they carry the fall of 2014. While the current its propaganda into areas outside its
out on camera. number is likely lower, due to Twitter’s physical domain. These messages
often contain shockingly sadistic
violence, designed to inspire or recruit
people with borderline personalities
to carry out their own violence in
ISIS’s name, whether as fighters
with the organisation or in so-called
"lone wolf" terrorist attacks where
they live. In sharp counterpoint to its
grisly executions, ISIS also sends out
carefully manipulated images of life
in its territories, which it depicts as
idyllic and utopian, although tinged
with harsh, violent justice for any who
fail to conform to its warped vision of
Islamic law.
Social media dramatically empowers
ISIS’s ambitions on the ground.

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