BICOM

On Friday, 26 February, BICOM hosted a conference call for journalists with Adam Hoffman from the Department of Political Science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and 2015 Neubauer Research Fellow at the program for Terrorism and Low Intensity Conflict at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), to discuss how ISIS and other Islamist extremists radicalise individuals on social media to the point where they commit violent acts of terrorism. Below is an edited transcript, with accompanying slides. You can listen to the audio of the briefing here.

Social media and radicalisation

Social media is a tool which is used by many groups, violent and non-violent, including peaceful protestors – for example in Occupy Wall Street and in the Arab Spring – but we see it embraced by extremists and specifically ISIS. One of the main questions here is why does ISIS use it so much and why are they so good at attracting people via social media. It’s really important to factor in here the issue that for ISIS, expanding both its territory and attracting more and more people is not just a practical need but also a central part of its ideology. The notion of the caliphate is something which is constantly expanding and requires promotion to show both to Western countries and also to Muslim states that it’s been successful. Part of that success is bringing people from very diverse backgrounds to its own project, and social media fits in with this need to attract more and more people.

How does it play here and why is it successful? I think that we have to look at three factors. First of all, social media allows them to bridge geographical distances. You have no need for any kind of physical contact to be able to approach someone, to attract someone and to successfully recruit them to your own personal project: in this case, joining ISIS, either physically in Raqqa or Mosul, or committing acts on behalf of ISIS somewhere in the West. In a sense, what the radical mosque used to be used until a few years ago, and still may be today, really became social media as a platform for interaction and recruitment.

The second development which seems relevant here is of course a platform for the production, sharing and consumption of content much more easily than ever before. Whether it’s a video or Dabiq magazine (ISIS’ English-language propaganda magazine), any kind of media is much easier today to actually produce and disseminate online. It also allows you to target very specific audiences and individuals, not just a wide demographic, which you may have identified in advance, and you’re able to tailor both the message and the messenger. If, for example, you want to recruit an American teenager, or a Danish teenager, we can actually have someone who is very close from that demographic; an actual ISIS supporter who is still active from the West, or a Danish foreign fighter who is active on social media. He can approach someone in his own language – the same kind of culture  – to tailor the message to someone very specifically, rather than have a general call of ‘join ISIS’ and become part of the Caliphate. So it’s really important that we try to see why ISIS is more successful in terms of initial motivation and actual effort in recruiting people from very diverse backgrounds.

ISIS’ tools

We have here recruitment on social media being a key part of ISIS’s efforts and organisational structure. They have several media outlets: Al Hayat – which is responsible for the Western propaganda, including the beheading videos – but also many other propaganda products, primarily Dabiq magazine in English. It’s something which targets Arabic speaking audiences, English speaking audiences, and other languages as well. There are ISIS magazines in English, Russian, French, Turkish and Arabic. They also use social media successfully for propaganda, which is also relevant as an issue of radicalisation as a platform to expose their message to the widest possible audience. In many cases, we see in the initial experience of ISIS and the initial exposure these kind of jihadi videos or messages on Twitter, and these kind of products which are widely available even if you are not approached in a more personal way.

One of the more sophisticated ways which are used to maximise the exposure is using hashtags. ISIS has been doing this for quite a while, using a very popular hashtags alongside an ISIS affiliated hashtag whenever they want to publish a new video or promote a certain operation. For example, during the World Cup they embedded the World Cup hashtag and started tweeting activities using, for example, #WorldCup and #IslamcState or #IslamicCaliphate. They have done the same thing during the Scotland independence referendum and other contexts as well. This is not just using social media as a platform, but really an attempt to maximise the exposure of these kind of messages, videos, tweets and accounts using or “hijacking” hashtags to make sure that the maximum number of people will be able to see it in the first place. In this way, even if they’re not actual supporters of ISIS to start with, they are exposed to this kind of message through this usage of Twitter.

Then you have something which appeals to people on a more specific demographic. You talk about teenagers; the main points are that as you market an idea of identity, of struggle, of making meaning, you market this  idea that ‘jihad is sexy’, ‘jihad is cool’, ‘jihad is something anyone can join and become part of something much greater than themselves’. We have this notion of ‘jihadi celebrity’. We’ve seen ever since Dabiq number six the glorification of specific figures in ISIS who in the West may have been nobodies: sixteen, eighteen, 20-something year olds, maybe searching for a cause or maybe just going about their everyday lives, but in the context of ISIS you can become something much better by becoming part of the organisation. By committing acts of terrorism against Western targets, becoming a Mujahid – a “holy warrior” in this kind of context – you can be glorified and commemorated as shahids, as martyrs who have died for the cause.

Tailoring for specific demographics

We have in the attached slide an enlarged photo, something about them explaining how they joined ISIS and what they motivations were; something on a personal level which presents them in a wider context of the ISIS idea as an organisation. I think this is not for everyone, but maybe for young males. For people who are more interested in action and joining a greater cause than themselves, then we have here something which appeals to this sense of purpose and draws more people to this idea in the first place. But this is not for all demographics. We see only young males, either from the Middle East or from Europe, who are glorified in this sense.

Another aspect, which is mainly from the European perspective more prominent, is really the women – the so-called ‘jihadi brides’ who are attracted to ISIS even if they have no prior understanding of Islam or knowledge of ISIS in any sense. We saw this with some Austrian teenagers and also more recently with a Swedish fifteen year old who was rescued from ISIS by Kurdish Special Forces, who by her own account had no familiarity with ISIS or Islam, but through exposure online, via her boyfriend, became convinced of the need to emigrate to Iraq and join ISIS. Here social media really acted as a catalyst, not so much for the decision in the first place, but as a platform of exposure to ISIS videos and ideas that lured her and her boyfriend together to Iraq, to the city of Mosul, to join ISIS forces there.

So we have here more of a personal approach. In the case of women, there is a greater focus on individuals, to tailor the message and to groom them over a longer process online. This is not, I should stress, only limited to Europeans and teenagers: we’ve also seen these kind of examples from Jordan, Tunisia and Egypt. In several cases, some of them managed to escape ISIS and return to their home countries. Others have been less fortunate.

When we talk about radicalisation, it’s really important to say that it’s not something which happens overnight. It’s not just that someone sees ISIS messages on Twitter and all of a sudden becomes convinced that they’re the right cause to join and decides to join them in Raqqa. But through social media it’s possible now, much more easily than before, to approach these individuals, groom them, and really to engage with them on a more personal level during a long period of time, largely undetected. You have no idea of who they’re texting or what they’re using the internet or Facebook for. Being able to approach people, to tailor these kinds of messages on a more personal level, and to develop this kind of online relationship, is key to understanding how ISIS is able to draw people from so many different backgrounds, including teenagers, men, women, European Muslims – something which we haven’t seen before.  Even today amongst other jihadist organisations – such as Jabat Al-Nusra, Al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate – who use social media for of recruitment, we see nothing that comes close to ISIS in terms of numbers of people who actually travel to Syria to join them, or the number of people who carry out attacks on their behalf in Western countries. In terms of demographics, a very wide category of people actually joined and it’s something which we haven’t seen before.

In that sense, we have something which combines recent technology with the availability of social media, which makes it much easier to tailor to specific audiences using Twitter and Facebook. Facebook is used mainly for the more personal connections and Twitter just to get the message out, upload videos and post them to Youtube and other sites as well. But we also have here the more social and human element, which applies also to the psychological sophistication part of ISIS in trying to tailor these messages to fit the more general ISIS message to a very specific group of people.

Combating radicalisation on social media

What’s being done to counter how ISIS is using social media to recruit and radicalise? We have two categories of efforts. The first one which I think is really necessary in the long run is to promote counter narratives, especially more credible counter narratives. It’s what Prime Minister Cameron and President Obama have been calling for to counter violent extremism. We’ve seen here a variety of efforts. One of them which is interesting, though I’m not sure how effective it is, is the Sawab Centre: a joint effort of the US and UAE Governments which combines Twitter messages, both in Arabic and in English, trying to counter ISIS and delegitimise them on Islamic grounds using culturally nuanced arguments. The problem with something like that is that you need to have sustained activity over time to match what ISIS has been able to do  in order to actually have the same kind of influence and exposure as they have. So this represents a different kind of challenge for all governments, but I think that it really presents the right approach, it should be done on that basis.

The other things that governments – the UK Government and especially the American Government – have been asking for a very long time from technology companies such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube is to cooperate with them in the fight against ISIS online. This is something which Google has been doing quite creatively about for a while, especially since 2014 after the James Foley beheading video was published on YouTube and shortly afterwards removed. But – at least until recently – Twitter has been the least responsive to this kind of request. This changed in early February, when they changed their policies on extremist content, saying that they removed 125,000 ISIS-affiliated Twitter accounts on their platform since mid-2015. This is not the perfect solution, and as Twitter itself admits, there is no “magic algorithm” to remove all this content from the internet but it is a significant step because what it does achieve is cutting off the link between hardcore ISIS operatives and a larger audience.

One of the indicators for this success is actually how ISIS themselves reacted to it. One of the things that ISIS has done in reaction on Twitter is to reopen an account after a few minutes. The return from that suspension is presented by ISIS supporters as an act of defiance against Western powers, so by reopening the account they present it as an act of defiance against an attempt to shut out ‘the truth’, as defined by the ISIS propaganda online. More recently, there was a new ISIS video which personally referred to Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, and Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, for their efforts to combat ISIS’ influence online. I think these acts of “defiance” against suspensions are pretty good indicators for the pressure which is being applied to ISIS online on their social media presence.

Should Western news outlets think quite hard before republishing propaganda videos or images?

Certainly, this is not a new dilemma for journalists and the media because we’ve seen that terrorists are reliant on the media going back to the 1960’s and 1970’s. This is really a basic part of the terrorist DNA; the need to get the word out and to magnify their perceived impact on various audiences. I think that in terms of ISIS, however, the dilemma is more acute. We see that the news of jihadi videos and Islamic songs (nasheeds) are used to address more Muslim audiences and to appeal to other demographics. The use of Twitter does present a new dilemma because once you broadcast them, you run the risk of really increasing the radicalisation and recruiting efforts and really pushing more people into ISIS’s hands.

I think that these kinds of videos on social media shouldn’t be overstated, but there are two benefits to actually broadcasting what they produce, but in a more understated manner. The first one is that people should be aware of the threat of ISIS and their atrocities and whatever they do. By not broadcasting something that they published, this awareness to ISIS and their radicalisation efforts is potentially impaired.  There is an awareness factor which should be taken into consideration; after a while people are more aware of online radicalisation and recruitment. The more that these kind of target demographics for ISIS – such as teenagers, young European Muslims, young individuals in the West more generally – are aware that actually they are prey for ISIS, then as with sexual predators online, maybe we’ll have at some point immunity to this message and a more community-based awareness which could help in resisting these efforts to radicalise and recruit. This is why under specific circumstances, and in a more understated manner, there is a place to amplify the fact that they are using social media for such purposes in the first place.

The second one, which is a more ethical and academic consideration, is that we need this kind of information for the historical record. When we try to understand ISIS, not just today but also maybe in a decade or two, what they produced, the propaganda, the videos, Dabiq: it will be key material to understand ISIS as a phenomenon. So while this shouldn’t be a primary consideration for the media whether to air or not to air the material, by blocking them out completely we run the risk of not really understanding who they are as a phenomenon and as an idea, and this could maybe impair our understanding of ISIS in the long term. But again, we are talking about media coverage which is highly critical and understated, not to automatically give ISIS the platform it seeks and the publicity it desires. So I think that the right approach to this question would be to present it in a much more critical and reframed manner than we have done, but not to block them out completely.