1. How ISIS Games Twitter
The militant group that conquered northern Iraq is deploying a
sophisticated social-media strategy.
J.M. BERGERJUN 16 2014, 2:00 PM ET
Pete Simon/Flickr
The advance of an army used to be marked by war drums. Now it’s
marked by volleys of tweets.
The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group that
seized Iraq’s second-largest city last week and is now pledging to take
Baghdad, has honed this new technique—most recently posting photos
on Twitter of an alleged mass killing of Iraqi soldiers. But what’s often
overlooked in press coverage is that ISIS doesn’t just have strong,
organic support online. It also employs social-media strategies that
inflate and control its message. Extremists of all stripes are increasingly
using social media to recruit, radicalize and raise funds, and ISIS is one
of the most adept practitioners of this approach.
One of ISIS's more successful ventures is an Arabic-language Twitter app
called The Dawn of Glad Tidings, or just Dawn. The app, an official ISIS
2. product promoted by its top users, is advertised as a way to keep up on
the latest news about the jihadi group.
Hundreds of users have signed up for the app on the web or on their
Android phones through the Google Play store. When you download the
app, ISIS asks for a fair amount of personal data:
J.M. Berger
Once you sign up, the app will post tweets to your account—the content
of which is decided by someone in ISIS’s social-media operation. The
tweets include links, hashtags, and images, and the same content is also
tweeted by the accounts of everyone else who has signed up for the app,
spaced out to avoid triggering Twitter’s spam-detection algorithms. Your
Twitter account functions normally the rest of the time, allowing you to
go about your business.
Tweets Sent by ISIS's Social-Media App Over a 2-
Hour Period
3. J.M. Berger
The app first went into wide use in April 2014, but its posting activity has
ramped up during the group’s latest offensive, reaching an all-time high
of almost 40,000 tweets in one day as ISIS marched into the northern
Iraqi city of Mosul last week. On Sunday, as the media reported on the
group’s advance toward Baghdad, hundreds of Dawn app users began
sending thousands of tweets featuring an image of an armed jihadist
gazing at the ISIS flag flying over the city, with the text, “We are coming,
Baghdad” (see below).
The volume of these tweets was enough to make any search for
“Baghdad” on Twitter generate the image among its first results, which is
certainly one means of intimidating the city’s residents.
4. J.M. Berger
The app is just one way ISIS games Twitter to magnify its message.
Another is the use of organized hashtag campaigns, in which the group
enlists hundreds and sometimes thousands of activists to repetitively
tweet hashtags at certain times of day so that they trend on the social
network. This approach also skews the results of a popular Arabic
Twitter account called @ActiveHashtags that tweets each day’s top
trending tags. When ISIS gets its hashtag into the @ActiveHashtags
stream, it results in an average of 72 retweets per tweet, which only
makes the hashtag trend more. As it gains traction, more users are
exposed to ISIS’s messaging. The group’s supporters also run accounts
similar to @ActiveHashtags that exclusively feature jihadi content and
can produce hundreds of retweets per tweet.
ISIS uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding concepts.
5. As a result of these strategies, and others, ISIS is able to project strength
and promote engagement online. For instance, the ISIS hashtag
consistently outperforms that of the group’s main competitor in Syria,
Jabhat al-Nusra, even though the two groups have a similar number of
supporters online. In data I analyzed in February, ISIS often registered
more than 10,000 mentions of its hashtag per day, while the number of
al-Nusra mentions generally ranged between 2,500 and 5,000.
ISIS also uses hashtags to focus-group messaging and branding
concepts, much like a Western corporation might. Earlier this year, ISIS
hinted, without being specific, that it was planning to change the name of
its organization. Activists then carefully promoted a hashtag crafted to
look like a grassroots initiative, demanding that ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-
Baghdadi declare not an Islamic state in Syria and Iraq, but the rebirth of
an Islamic caliphate. The question of when and how to declare a new
caliphate is highly controversial in jihadi circles, and the hashtag
produced a great deal of angry and divisive discussion, which ISIS very
likely tracked and measured. It never announced a name change.
Media attention has focused, not unreasonably, on ISIS’s use of social
media to spread pictures of graphic violence, attract new fighters, and
incite lone wolves. But it’s important to recognize that these activities are
supported by sophisticated online machinery. ISIS does have legitimate
support online—but less than it might seem. And it owes a lot of that
support to a calculated campaign that would put American social-media-
marketing gurus to shame.
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/isis-iraq-twitter-social-media-
strategy/372856/
