A recent study published last Thursday highlighted the dark side of social media networks. The study that was conducted by the Brooking Institute and financed by Google Ideas stated that the so-called Islamic State (IS) had been extremely successful at spreading its ideology and messages using nothing but the modern tools of social media. It is truly astonishing, and ironic at the same time, that the terrorist group, which took it upon its shoulders to take us centuries back in time is using one of the most modern communication tools to reach out to people.
“Jihadists will exploit any kind of technology that will work to their advantage,” said J. M. Berger, an expert on online extremism who was the lead author of the study. “(IS) is much more successful than other groups (in using social media).”
Despite being tangled in a war with the international coalition in the areas it is controlling in Iraq and Syria, the terrorist group has been active, and to some extent successful, in promoting its messages and attracting followers from widespread areas across the Middle East and Europe. Apparently, the secret is in its focused and organized use of social media especially Twitter.
According to the study, there is a minimum of 46,000 Twitter accounts that are operating under the influence of the IS. “IS has been able to exert an outsized impact on how the world perceives it,” the study said.
Twitter attempts to hunt and shut down these accounts resulted in death threats against the company’s leaders and employees as reported by The New York Times. The seriousness with which this terrorist organization is taking its Twitter accounts reveals that it is a cornerstone in its public relations and media strategy.
The study was conducted from September till December of 2014, and analyzed the suspected accounts based on different criteria such as the number of followers, languages, using hashtags, timing of sending messages, etc.
The truth is that fighting such accounts on an open platform like Twitter (same goes for Facebook, Instagram, etc) is not that easy. Twitter has around 288 million accounts, monitoring each and every account of them is almost impossible. “To have that many accounts in a very disciplined way out there doing the same thing every day is a pretty powerful tool,” Berger said. “It doesn’t sound like it’s that much, but it’s very difficult to get that many people who are that committed.”
It is a new arena for cyber terrorism. It will take time and efforts from social media companies and governmental agencies to find an effective way to deal with it. However, there is a simple thing that we can all do to curb the influence of such groups on social media; stop following them, stop retweeting their messages, and stop using their hashtags. Such strategy would halt their ideas from getting popular. Their plans of spreading shock and awe to attract viewers, and potential believers, would cease to exist when no one is actually interacting with them.
