Can the U.S. out-tweet the terrorists?
Published: 15 August 2014 02:45 PM
Updated: 15 August 2014 02:58 PM
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The American effort appeared to amuse some of the Islamist tweeps who were engaged in the battle. “Your boss is going to fire you soon if these tweets don’t improve,” joked someone named Abu Ottoman.
This exchange wasn’t accidental or uncommon. It’s part of a State Department program to change how the United States deals with extremist communications online. For years, the government vacillated over how to respond to al-Qaeda’s online broadcasts, from its martyrdom videos to Inspire, the terrorist group’s slick English-language digital magazine. Fighting back was considered beneath the office — we don’t negotiate with terrorists and all that.
Under the George W. Bush administration, the government also believed it was fighting such a vast, communist-like ideological threat that there were simply too many jihadists to try to dissuade them one by one on social media. The better approach, the previous administration thought, was to campaign broadly for freedom. “For the longest time, there was total resistance in the State Department to badmouthing al-Qaeda — as a job that the State Department should be engaged in — and that the real solution should be to sell America, to tell America’s story,” says Will McCants, who helped set up the CSCC when he served as a senior adviser for countering violent extremism at the State Department.
That has changed under Bush’s successor, Barack Obama, who took a much narrower view of terrorism, confining his focus to al-Qaeda and seeking to make it less a war than a law-enforcement and intelligence problem. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the State Department began to a pursue a policy of what she called “21st-century statecraft,” a broad designation that included anything from using social media to speak directly to people in the developing world to helping foreign dissidents set up secure communications networks.
Now, the government is trying to go on offense, challenging terrorist propaganda all across the new digital battleground and seeking to wean would-be terrorists from the cause, recruit by recruit, using the hashtag #ThinkAgainTurnAway. The CSCC wants to “contest the space” that, in the words of State Department senior official Alberto Fernandez, who oversees the program, “had previously been conceded to the enemy.”
In practice, this means that the center, with its $5 million budget, verbally jousts with jihadists on social media all day long. Not a bad idea, according to experts like McCants. The problem is that it appears to be losing — at least when it comes to showing the quick thinking and verbal dexterity that so characterizes the big winners in the social-media universe. In an arena in which people are largely inured to the frequent intrusions of advertising, the center is conducting itself like it’s the only propaganda operation in town.
The way the program works is fairly simple: The State Department’s analysts follow online chatter about the latest ISIL victory or news of a recent al-Shabaab massacre in Kenya, and then they try to insert themselves into the conversation. The idea is less to sway committed terrorists than to persuade fence-sitters not to join up or provide material support.
But State’s messages usually arrive with all the grace of someone’s dad showing up at a college party. The posts tend to be blunt, adversarial and plagued by poor Photoshop work. Typically, “Think Again Turn Away,” as the CSCC’s English-language Twitter account calls itself, delivers hectoring messages written in the schoolmarmish tone of Reagan-era “Just Say No” commercials — only this time it is terrorism, not drugs, they’re trying to scare everyone away from.
And because the government’s tweeting is so flat and self-serious, few people — even those most sympathetic to its messaging — are motivated to share the CSCC’s posts. As anyone bidding for attention on social media knows, that’s a serious problem.
Islamic State supporters, by contrast, can be playful and droll, though sometimes the humor is exceedingly macabre and only appeals to a certain sensibility. Many of the photos being circulated — such as one of a dead Shiite man floating in a body of water, alongside a joke about him being taught to scuba dive — are horrific, but they also make for popular jihadist memes. (That particular picture was retweeted nine times and favorited 15.)
The plain fact is that, for now, groups like the Islamic State are far more sophisticated than the State Department in their messaging.
The rise of social media has transformed how jihadist propaganda is disseminated, news is spread and recruits are gathered. Extremist groups have proved themselves to be rather adept at utilizing new forms of digital communication. Knowing that Western intelligence agencies are likely watching, the Islamic State and its sympathizers have taken to hopscotching among various social networks, using each for different tasks: Twitter and YouTube for propagandizing and making initial contacts; Ask.fm for establishing a closer rapport; and private messaging apps like Kik and Surespot for disseminating instructions about how to find an Islamic State-associated imam, or where to cross the porous Turkey-Syria border.
At the same time, open-source intelligence — the gathering of intelligence from public forums — has become an essential tool for analyzing the opinions of large populations, tracking terrorist activities and seeing how radicalization plays out online. Yet despite this glut of new information sources, there had been reluctance about using the State Department as a bully pulpit until fairly recently.
In the past, the American government preferred to respond to jihadist activity online with covert means — monitoring chatrooms, shutting down password-protected forums or making them difficult to access. Sometimes intelligence analysts would let members of a jihadist forum know that they were watching. “It’s like inserting an informant into a prison to sow distrust,” says William Braniff, the executive director of START, a terrorism research center at the University of Maryland. “People no longer trust their cellmate.”
But those efforts also had the effect of making forums “much less vibrant places,” Braniff says. Jihadists began to retreat from communicating in spaces where they once felt they could speak freely, and intelligence gathering suffered.
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