SANTA ANA, California — In March 2013, the terrorist group Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Magreb opened a Twitter account that garnered 5,500 followers within a month. The account follows seven other terrorist-affiliated Twitter accounts, including that of Al-Shabaab, a Somali terrorist group. Al Shabaab’s Twitter follows a rebel group in Aleppo, and so on, creating an online network of terrorists.
The attacks on September 11 sparked a massive rise of terrorist organizations — especially those affiliated with Al-Qaeda — moving online, with thousands of terrorists website appearing.
Social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Flickr — are being used to recruit new members, raise funds and spread the message of radicalism. Anti-Western groups have learned how to take a Western tool, social media, and use it against its creators. “They [terrorist organizations]know exactly who are the people accessing social media, and these are especially young people that are perfect target groups for them,” says Gabriel Weimann, a leading scholar of terrorism and media.
Weimann cites Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev as examples of the extremist messages spread through social media exerting its influence on young people. The Tsarnaev brothers are the ones behind the publicized Boston Bombings that killed three people and injured 264 others last April.
The brothers have been labeled as “lone wolves,” a new term used to describe individuals acting seemingly alone, without the support of terrorist groups.
“I would argue that lone wolves are not really lone wolves,” Weimann says. “There is a virtual pack behind them… If you think about those two brothers… If you look at the websites they visited and what they downloaded, you’ll find that those lone wolves were not alone.”
The social media profiles of terrorists have gained followers and funding from all over the world. In Syria, groups of extremist fighters were posting pictures of themselves lounging in swimming pools and fancy houses, in order to attract new recruits from other parts of the world.
“In the beginning there was this phrase that was coined by a lot of the jihadists on the ground, which was the so-called five-star jihad,” says Professor Neumann, director of the International Center for Radicalization and Political Violence at King’s College in London.
“Now we can see on the social media profiles that they’re trying to dial that back a little bit and they’re saying, ‘Actually you should really only come here if you’re serious about fighting and you’re prepared to die.’”
Social media has been used widely in the Syrian conflict, not just by terrorist groups, but by charities and activists as well. Facebook provides a platform for terrorist organizations to raise money, but it can also facilitate donations through charities for relief packs to families.
Adnan Sheikh, a resident of Moadmayeh in Syria, describes how he has used social media to “document history and to show the destruction.” Sheikh published videos and photographs online to provide evidence of the conflict for future generations.
Yet this conflict that has also been inflamed by social media. The opposition to the Syrian government began using social media in 2005 as a safe way to express dissent for the Assad regime. Public protest at that time would have been too dangerous.
Social media has not only played a role in escalating the conflict in Syria, but has also been used by ISIS in their recent advances into Iraq.
ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, tweeted a picture of a beheaded Iraqi police chief posed sitting down with his severed head in his lap. The picture was accompanied by the words, “This is our ball… it has skin on it,” and the hashtag #WorldCup.
The post was seen by millions who followed the World Cup on Twitter. It served as free mass advertising for ISIS, instilling fear and intimidation in those who saw it.
Another similar tactic was used by the Syrian Electronic Army, a group of computer hackers who support Assad’s Syria. In 2013, they hacked the Associated Press’s twitter account and sent a tweet saying, “Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured.”
The tweet was sent to AP’s two million followers at 1:07 in the afternoon. At 1:08, the Dow stock dropped 150 points. Two minutes later, the market stabilized, 7.15 points lower than it had been previously.
The attack was dismissed by most news outlets as amateur, but NPR reporter Andy Carvin wondered what the impact would be had more than one Twitter account been hacked. The claim would have been less obviously incorrect and the delay in market stabilization could have been minutes instead of seconds.
Through their own social media sites and through hacking onto influential accounts, terrorist organizations are able to wield more influence than ever before: gaining funds and recruits from around the world and feeding conflicts in areas like Syria.
The influence exercised by terrorist organizations through social media is vast, and points to a deeper problem: poverty. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu has said: “You can never win a war against terror as long as there are conditions in the world that make people desperate — poverty, disease, and ignorance.”
In October 2013, the U.N. released a report supporting this assertion by revealing the poverty statistics of conflict-ridden Syria. “More than half the population now live in poverty,” the report states, “with 7.9 million people becoming poor since the beginning of the crisis, of whom 4.4 million live in extreme poverty.”
Former U.S. Secretary of State General Colin Powell agrees, as well, and says that in order to eradicate terrorism, the U.S. has to “root out the whole system. We have to go after poverty.”
– Julianne O’Connor
Sources: National Journal, CNN, Yahoo!7News, Media Measurement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Daily News Egypt
Photo: IACP