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REVEALED: Secrets, Methods Behind The #ISIS Social Media Wave
21st Century Wire says…
It’s time to reveal the social media secrets of ISIS/ISIL/IS. They are the same social media techniques and #hash tag scams used by US political campaigns to market their candidates (including Barack Obama) and used major US corporations to market their products and services…
Long before it was trendy in the mainstream media, 21WIRE was warning of a rise within social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, of Islamic Terrorist groups (now called ISIS) based in Syria and Turkey who were using social media to glorify extreme violence and for recruiting and fundraising purposes.
(See a full report of ISIS social media stats compiled by Memri.org in a PDF document found here).
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‘IS: Islamic social media state of mind‘
Iyad Barakat
Over the past year, the Islamic State group (IS, formerly known as ISIS) has cultivated the inherent strengths and weakness of the Internet and social media with growing sophistication.
IS members and supporters have proven their social media and by launching a sustained, coherent and powerful communications strategy to intimidate the international community, terrorise local populations in the Middle East and seduce new recruits to join their ranks.
So extensive and successful has the IS media presence been that, increasingly, IS the organisation has become indistinguishable from IS the media phenomenon.
The group made its dramatic debut on the global stage in June 2014 with the capture of the Iraqi city of Mosul. The capture was accompanied by a well-organised social media campaign designed for maximum media exposure.
In Iraq, the IS was blessed with an enemy, the Iraqi government, totally oblivious to social media and the need for a counter communications strategy. At the time of the IS offensive, the Iraqi government did not have any official social media channels, let alone a web communications strategy, Twitter or Facebook accounts, to communicate its own version of events or to rebut IS propaganda and claims.
On the other hand IS, building on al-Qaeda’s long established web presence and harnessing long established virtual communities, had already established the credibility and authority of its official updated-around-the-clock Twitter accounts and Facebook pages. Over time these channels have become a main source of credible information for mainstream media reports and ordinary citizens of the region alike.
In the push for Mosul, the IS group demonstrated how deftly is its use of social media and how carefully planned its timing. The group chose to break stories of military advances between 10 pm and 4 am at night while Iraqi officials were mostly at home or fast asleep and not available for interviews. That meant IS versions of battlefield progress would break uncontested when reported by international media and local media, further amplifying their impact. This in turn fed back to social media pages creating a deafening buzz.
Exhausted, confused and anxious – Iraqi army, security forces and civilians soon retreated to run for cover.
Crowdsourcing
During the week of the offensive against Mosul, IS and its social media support crowd flooded twitter and other platforms with thousands of coordinated posts by publishing the same message repeatedly. On 29 August, the European Centre for Law and Justice submitted a report on the use of social media by the IS to the United Nations General Assembly. Among the findings, it was noted how, “On 13 June 2014, ISIS posted a picture of a decapitated head on Twitter, along with the following text: ‘This is our football, it’s made of skin #WorldCup’”. By using the #WorldCup, IS managed to expose the gruesome photograph to thousands of innocent Twitter users who were simply following the FIFA World Cup.
IS used a technique often used by US political campaigners – including that of Barack Obama in 2010. It developed a smart phone application called The Dawn of Glad Tidings and distributed it through Google Play store. The official description of the app was an “app that gives you news from Syria, Iraq and the Islamic world”. Thousands of users from around the world downloaded the app and were using it to follow events on the ground. Unwittingly to most of them, the app was also posting tweets, including links, hashtags and images, to users’ accounts. The IS application on the one hand was amplifying the groups messages by harnessing the power of the “crowd” while at the same time avoiding triggering Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms.
Deploying ‘The Dawn of Glad Tiding’ application is one example of how IS uses crowdsourcing, a powerful social media tool. This process has been central to the group’s social media strategy and is also used by large corporations like Dell and government agencies...
Continue this article at al-Araby al-Jadeed
READ MORE ISIS NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire ISIS Files
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21st Century Wire is an alternative news agency designed to enlighten, inform and educate readers about world events which are not always covered in the mainstream media.
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