BY ONNIK JAMES KRIKORIAN | Thursday, March 12 2015
Typical Twitter profile pictures used by ISIS supporters (Photo courtesy J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morgan)
In 2013, Humera Khan, Executive Director of D.C.-based think tank Muflehun, watched as a teenager was radicalised and recruited on Twitter. “Over the course of two years,” she recently recounted for Foreign Affairs, “that individual went from an activist championing minority rights to supporting Jabhat al Nusra (al Qaeda in Syria), and in a final shift of allegiance, to one of the the largest distributors of ISIS propaganda. He is now in Syria.” Despite reporting the case to the law enforcement agencies in the United States, Khan says her warnings fell on deaf ears.
But in the wake of a sophisticated online media campaign that includes a number of gruesome videos of beheadings, governments are starting to take the use of social media by groups such as ISIS more seriously. Previously, and even though U.S. President Barack Obama had established the Centre for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) in 2011 with its Digital Outreach Team (DOT) sending out its own salvo of tweets initially targeting al Qaeda supporters, Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) practitioners such as Khan considered official initiatives ineffective.
“Trolling is ineffective for CVE and meaningful dialogue is needed with individuals, even when we disagree with everything they represent,” she told techPresident in July last year. However, with few others engaging alongside Khan, it also probably came as no surprise that upon taking up his appointment as Director of GCHQ, the British intelligence and security agency, Robert Hannigan wrote that the “largest US tech companies […] have become the command-and-control networks of choice for terrorists and criminals” in a controversial op-ed published by the Financial Times in November.
The words were harsh, and echoed by other government officials concerned that Twitter and other networks are being used for recruitment, but few had actually conducted any real analysis of how groups such as ISIS were using online social networks. That is, until the Brookings Institution published a report last week by counter-terrorism (CT) expert J.M. Berger and Ushahidi technologist Jonathon Morgan. Funded by Google Ideas, the report examines how important networks such as Twitter were to ISIS. The study, which was conducted from September to December last year, showed that it had at least 46,000 accounts, but not more than 70,000.
Photo courtesy J.M. Berger and Jonathon Morg
Please RT
No comments:
Post a Comment