How is the propaganda machine of Islamic State or IS working on social media, and to what extend is it affecting young muslims in Western countries?

11 November 2015 52 789 Report

Hi All,

I am preparing my PhD proposal and my topic is set " Social Media and Terrorist Propaganda". As I have stated above, I have come up with 2 questions that are both related but different in nature. I am searching for theories and methods that would fit my research questions. My ideas are still shaping so, any comment is welcome.

Sefa

Thomas Selegny Popular answer

Many researchers decided to examine the relationship between social media and jihadist movements such as Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy

For me, the strategy of jihadist movements is divided into several parts.

The first trump used by jihadist propaganda is a critique of Western civilization. It is a civilization that denied religion, based on frivolous pleasures and widespread debauchery, where men and women interact without any decency. Secondly, I think you can use the concept of "bare life", developed by the Italian scientist Giorgio Agamben. In short, 2000 Palestinians were killed in silence in the Gaza Strip; the West does nothing to stop it. However, when four Westerners are murdered by jihadists, major Western countries send forces. This shows a double standard regarding human lives.

Third, the Syrian conflict plays a vital role. ISIS highlighted the inaction of Western governments in 2013, when Bashar Assad committed genuinely a massacre in his own country. This was an undeniable engine of jihadist propaganda on social networks saying, basically: "What do you expect from the West ? they are slaughtering our brothers, sisters and thousands of children. Bashar el-Assad is their puppet..How can you continue to live among these monsters? ".

By using literally unbearable videos and photos of the conflict, their expectation is to trigger a reaction from observers. The main message of such propaganda is in fact: "Only merciless traitors may continue to live among these monsters You must act, either by joining us, or punish them for what they did."

My last but not least: the conspiracy. The West is against ISIS because the Caliphate is the only pure and just entity. The Caliphate is the only country struggling against sin, through the teachings of Islam and the Holy Quran. The West, corrupt to the bone, can not accept such a holy resurrection that it destroyed 90 years ago i.e. in 1924. In other words, this will certainly significantly undermine its interests. The West wants to continue to plunder the Muslim countries, but the Caliphate is the only country that can thwart its plan. In addition, the caliphate has the strength to provide defense and dignity of Muslims worldwide. This is why all Muslims should swear allegiance to the caliph, the only real authority Sunni Muslims. The caliphate should also annihilate those "idolatrous Shia dogs " because they are worse than "the Crusaders". They claim to be Muslims while they are kufr -misbelievers. They delude the message of the Prophet and they only deserve death. If you are a true Muslim, you have to join us to do so.

Finally, the main strategy of the jihadist groups through the social networks is to create a genuine partition between US and THEM.

M. Afzal Upal

Hi Sefa:

Have you seen the recent RAND ISIS Twitter report? There was also a recent Washingtonpost article which interviewed former ISIS media operatives now in jail in Morocco. According to these accounts, ISIS is extremely systematic in its messaging strategy. IS appears to have develped a post-modern military which gives informational (non-kinetic) effects primary importance and kinetic effects are only conducted in the service of clear informational goals. They also sdon't seem to be unencumbered with various restrictions (e.g., against black or grey PSYOPS) that affects western military IO units.

While ISIS social media efforts have had some success in terms of attracting youths from around to world to their cause, they have had limited success in attracting an extremely small number of world's Muslims (a few thousand out of billions). Key to the success they've had seems to be in tapping into a larger community of Islamic sympathisers who help them spread key aspects of their narratives. In contrast, western counter-narrative efforts have been limited by attempts to keep control of the message and the inability to inspire a large community of sympathisers who can support and amplify the messages being propagated by official sources. The Western counter-narrative has also not been well co-ordinated around a coherent alternative narrative that can appeal to Muslim youth in the West as well as in Muslim majority countries.

Asli telli aydemir

There is this big debate in social media about whether Islam should go under reformation in order to create a valve against boosting up of the terroristic organizations, movements etc. You could look at how this is perceived among the young Muslim community. Really current and controversial topic, wish you good luck in all your endeavors.

Thomas Selegny

Many researchers decided to examine the relationship between social media and jihadist movements such as Gilles Kepel, Olivier Roy

For me, the strategy of jihadist movements is divided into several parts.

Finally, the main strategy of the jihadist groups through the social networks is to create a genuine partition between US and THEM.

Collin Millington

Check out these articles. Why the Islamic State is Actually Brilliant at Social Media. A SURVEY OF TECHNIQUES FOR EVENT DETECTION IN TWITTER. Assessing the use of social media in a revolutionary environment. Google these articles and they will assist your research.

Adrian Smith

you might think of sending out a questionnaire on how social media impacts on peoples perceptions of reality and whether it has started to overtake conventional media as the instrument of choice to receiving information and then ask how much does social media influence our thinking today. then look at the issue as how personal social media is and how it can be used to influence people with its exclusivity that can be adapted to fit a personality type and provide influence to any part of the world that barring massive state surveillance is hard to police or monitor.

David Porter

Hi Sefa,

I'm doing a PhD at the moment myself involving IS and New Media Propaganda, but a bit different, as I'm looking at British state responses to it - I hope I can help a little bit.

First, you need to work out what you are going to say counts as 'propaganda' as opposed to political information or argument. If your best friend says David Cameron is an idiot, and enjoys relations with non-humans, is that propaganda? By some accounts yes, most others no. This is a real difficult thing to work out, and I'm lucky as I can side-step it somewhat by focussing on British definitions of 'Strategic Communication'. However, you do really need to think about this one carefully, then justify why you've chosen what you have.

Two books that are really helpful for getting a basic overview of the variety of definitions and the challenges involved are:-

Garth Jowett & Victoria O'Donnell (2012) Propaganda & Persuasion

and

David Welch (2013) Propaganda: Power and Persuasion

Also, how are you defining social media? Facebook, Twitter, Google+? Will you include messageboards like reddit and 4 chan? Imgur / Tumblr? We use social media as a nice catch-all term but the way information is passed on, debated and internalized is highly different depending on the platform in question.

In terms of your questions, I would try to look into the first question almost exclusively. I'll come back to it in more detail, but this is because of the massive difficulties in answering your second question.

Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to judge the effectiveness of propaganda. MI6 and other parts of the MOD have been carrying out these operations for decades, and they explicitly state on numerous occasions in documents that they can never tell how effective it is.

One could try, as Adrian suggested, a survey approach to judge how people are affected by the things they see on social media; but you would need a very large, mixed study to prove its effectiveness. It would be easiest to judge with just students (you'll have easy access) but you can't really extrapolate such a study convincingly.

Anyway, you can largely move on from doing this as a lot of research has already been done on this topic. If we assume that people's attitudes are changed by the political information they see (lots of studies have shown this) and then add in the fact that more and more people see political content through social media (basic surveys can be found showing social media uptake), then we can assume it affects them.

The difference is the networks of how political information and propaganda are distributed - because people can choose which people and accounts to 'follow' and receive content from, they overwhelmingly end up rejecting to receive information from people they disagree. Furthermore, research has shown that these groups tend to the more extreme position; this is argued to be to due to the "reinforcement of the groups central tendencies" (Gainous & Wagner 2013).

Further, interviewing or surveying those sympathetic to extremism will be extremely difficult, as many will not trust you, and you will need ethical approval from your university, which will be highly problematic, especially at the initial application stage.

For these reasons, I'd suggest focussing on the first question. This is also because - and I do speak from experience here - that you want as narrow a focus as possible for your PhD. Its 100,000 words and three years, but at thesis level everything becomes so crazy it will disappear quickly, and leave you without space for proper analysis. This is the big problem for PhDs, and can lead to poor results, according to my supervisors at least.

But I'm trying to not be too pessimistic, and say I think your second question is spot on. A lot of work has been done by think tanks and so on about ISIS propaganda strategy and themes (ISIS Twitter Census & the Rand study), but none of these have dealt with the new capabilities afforded by social media.

There are strong elements of online community building, humour, as well as the use of memes and Western cultural tropes (I remember seeing one where we were shown a still from Lord of the Rings, with the Mujihadeen as the Elves, and the West as Sauron's orcs).

I think there is still a lot of work to be done on this topic, as lots of work has been grounded in old assumptions about how propaganda is made and spread in the modern world. For example, how is it justified that IS is running all these accounts? Is it just assumed? In a world where you or I could whip up a piece of jihadist propaganda on our laptops in about two minutes, who is to say that all the propaganda is centrally commissioned?

Loads of questions still arise on this topic, and research will be well received. Just think about your contribution, i.e. what you are doing that is new or interesting - otherwise you will not get funding, or even accepted onto the program. Universities have finite resources to generate the research it needs to secure government funding - are you going to make it easier for them to do that?

Finally, be under no illusions how hard a PhD can be. It is mostly independent work, and can be really demoralising when you get stuck on a certain problem or issue. 3 years is also a long time. Be sure you go in with a clear mind, and nothing will get in your way.

Most of all though, good luck!

=========

Some books that may be helpful -

Bruce Bimber (2003) Information and American Democracy- this book, though old, is really prophetic about the structure of todays comms environment. Every study involved with online political information bears some reference to it, so you'll need to know about it in order to engage with others.

Jason Gainous & Kevin Wagner (2013) Tweeting to Power: The Social Media Revolution in American Politics- while focussed on American congressional politics, it has a great introduction that lays out all the research done on the topic, and can provide useful sources for further reading. Many of the arguments can be applied to IS propaganda and persuasion too.

Peter Burnham et al (2004) Research Methods in Politics - been almost invaluable to me in sorting out methodology design and jargon. Funding bodies really look at methodology carefully; they'll be making a roughly £60k investment in you, and they need to be sure. Getting your methodology down early will put you in a really good position.

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That's all (finally) and all I want to say now is good luck!

Mustafa Tekke

Hope these attached papers are helpful. Enjoy your reading.

Article CYBERTERRORISTS: THEIR COMMUNICATIVE MESSAGES AND THE EFFECT...

Conference Paper ISIS and Recruitment Using Social Media. Social Media vs. Le...

Article Al-Qaeda online radicalization and the creation of children terrorists

Sergey G. Nikitin

I think, and as shown by recent events (terrorist attacks in Paris and Brussels, committed by European citizens of Muslim faith), ISIS propaganda works more than well. This contributes to a toothless policy of the European Union and individual European States.

Joanie Chung-Yin Yeung

I wrote a paper on this particular topic

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316146537_A_Critical_Analysis_on_ISIS_Propaganda_and_Social_Media_Strategies

Feel free to comment.

Article A Critical Analysis on ISIS Propaganda and Social Media Strategies

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