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Iraq's Sunni Militants Take to Social Media to Advance Their Cause and Intimidate - New York Times

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Middle East |Iraq’s Sunni Militants Take to Social Media to Advance Their Cause and Intimidate



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BAGHDAD — The extremist group battling the Iraqi government, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, may practice a seventh-century version of fundamentalist Islam, but it has demonstrated modern sophistication when it comes to using social media, particularly Twitter and other sites like WordPress and Tumblr.


On Twitter, ISIS has hijacked World Cup hashtags, flooding unsuspecting soccer fans with its propaganda screeds. It has used Facebook as a death-threat generator; the text-sharing app

JustPaste to upload book-length tirades; the app SoundCloud for jihadi music; and YouTube and Twitter for videos to terrify its enemies.


One Twitter account that purports to be linked to ISIS even altered a picture of Michelle Obama to boast about its capture of American-made war matériel. The sign in her hands was changed from one saying “#BringBackOurGirls,” referring to the worldwide campaign to save the schoolgirls abducted in Nigeria, to one saying “#BringBackOurHumvee.”






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ISIS has outfought both its Syrian rivals and the Iraqi government online, as well as on the battlefield. The Iraqi government’s response has been to order Internet providers in the country to block most social media sites.



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What ISIS realized, more quickly and effectively than its rivals, was that “smartphones and social media accounts are all that is needed to instantly share material in real time with tens of thousands of jihadists,” said Rita Katz, a terrorism analyst who on Friday published a study of ISIS and Twitter on the website of the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist activity online.


“ISIS, as well as its fighters and supporters, quickly adopted these tools and has been utilizing the latest Internet technologies and social media outlets to maintain massive, sophisticated online media campaigns used to promote jihad, communicate, recruit and intimidate,” Ms. Katz wrote.


Soon, ISIS was posting Twitter messages from the battlefield in Syria and later in Iraq. When the governments it was fighting pulled the plug on its cellphone connections, it had engineers come in to set up mobile hot spots offering Internet access.


ISIS has also actively looked for ways to increase its traffic internationally, as part of its recruitment drive aimed at Europeans and Americans. At one point, the group hijacked several Twitter hashtags related to the World Cup and fed soccer enthusiasts ISIS propaganda instead of news about the current tournament in Brazil.


In one particularly gruesome instance, the organization posted a video of the beheading of a police officer on Twitter, with the message: “This is our ball. It’s made of skin #WorldCup.”


Aside from sowing terror and winning extremist admirers, ISIS’s use of social media has also had both strategic and tactical impacts on the battlefield.


In Mosul, two weeks before ISIS attacked and overran the city, it began broadcasting individualized death threats on its Facebook accounts to every Iraqi journalist working in the city, said one of those singled out.



Most of them fled or stopped working, which was probably one of the reasons the militants’ advance on the city received such little outside attention.



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During those weeks, ISIS also greatly stepped up its Twitter campaign, a kind of online equivalent of a pre-invasion artillery barrage, posting scores of videos and photographs of Iraqi soldiers being executed.


Officials at the Ministry of Communications later said that they shut down social media because the campaign by ISIS had undermined the morale of Iraqi soldiers in Mosul, contributing to the stunning overnight collapse of two full divisions.


Many experts on extremists’ online activity have complained that the social networking sites should be policing their platforms better.


“Twitter must adapt to these new circumstances and become more proactive in deterring such activity,” Ms. Katz said. “It has the capability to carry out account monitoring and suspensions on much larger scales than it has thus far.”


In response to inquiries about ISIS’s Twitter presence, Nu Wexler, a Twitter spokesman, said: “We don’t comment on individual accounts or suspensions. We do not proactively monitor content on the platform, but we review accounts when they’re reported to us and suspend them if they violate our rules.”


Mr. Wexler declined to answer any other questions about ISIS’s use of Twitter.


An official of a social networking site, who said he would speak frankly only if his name was not used, said the huge size of the major sites made it impossible to enforce rules against terrorists’ use. “It’s kind of like whack-a-mole,” he said.


“We constantly look at these things and when we find them we take them down,” he said. “Our policy is any terrorist organization, we take down.”


For instance, Facebook has shut down a half-dozen accounts linked to ISIS, the social networking official said.


ISIS’s use of Twitter is even more pervasive than its use of Facebook, since its brevity lends itself to posts from the field. It runs Twitter campaigns in each of the provinces where it operates, and also has campaigns based on activities on the battlefield and elsewhere.


One of ISIS’s newest Twitter hashtags trending in jihadi forums is #CalamityWillBefallUS, a response to reports that the United States is sending advisers and armed drones to Iraq.


The feed is full of invective and praise for 9/11, as well as photographs of the World Trade Center attacks, wounded American troops and coffins draped in American flags.




Reporting was contributed by Karam Shoumali from Istanbul; Duraid Adnan and Ayman Oghanna from Baghdad; and an Iraqi employee of The New York Times.



A version of this article appears in print on June 29, 2014, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Iraq’s Sunni Militants Take to Social Media to Advance Their Cause and Intimidate .




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