A Brief History of Propaganda During Conflict: Lessons for Counter-Terrorism Strategic Communications
September 18, 2023
There is a tendency in scholarly and strategic-policy fields to see the propaganda produced by groups like Islamic State and Al-Qaeda as historically unheralded. As evidence, slickly produced communiques and a penchant for using social media are typically highlighted. This narrow perspective, in placing the current phenomenon into an historical and thematic vacuum, infers that ...
Cheering on the Jihad: An Exploration of Women’s Participation in Online Pro-jihadist Networks
September 18, 2023
With the rise of the Islamic State (IS), a great deal of attention has recently been drawn to two issues that have come to be seen as intricately linked: the role of women within pro-jihadist networks (Lahoud 2014; Hoyle, Bradford and Frenett 2015; Saltman and Smith 2015) and the use of social media as an ...
Utilization of Cyberspace by Terrorist Groups and the Applicability of the Malaysian Law on Terrorism
September 18, 2023
It is an obvious and undeniable fact, that the cyberspace is become a powerful method which is increasingly and quickly utilized by terrorist organizations to achieve their gruesome and nefarious goals by hitting innocent individuals. This paper has conducted a critical and comprehensive study on the literature review aiming to answer several inquiries about utilization ...
Isis and the Internet
September 18, 2023
Documentary: Isis and The Internet premieres Friday April 1st at 10pm ET on MSNBC. ...
How the U.S. is Countering the Islamic Extremist Propaganda Machine
September 18, 2023
President Obama reiterated his promise to destroy the virulent Islamic State Tuesday while talking about the Orlando mass shooting — and how gunman Omar Mateen, a U.S. citizen, may have been radicalized by online extremist propaganda. NewsHour producer P.J. Tobia reports on U.S. efforts to win the hearts and minds that the terrorists are trying ...
Hearing: Countering the Virtual Caliphate: The State Department’s Performance
September 18, 2023
The United States is losing the information war to terrorists like ISIS and Hezbollah. Earlier this year, the administration rebranded the office responsible for counter messaging, but little seems to have changed. A strong, effective information offensive to counter the violent ideology being pushed by ISIS and other terrorists is long overdue. This hearing will ...
Video Games, Terrorism, and ISIS’s Jihad 3.0
September 18, 2023
This study discusses different media strategies followed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In particular, the study attempts to understand the way ISIS’s video game that is called “Salil al-Sawarem” (The Clanging of the Swords) has been received by the online Arab public. The article argues that the goal behind making and ...
Online Social Media in the Syria Conflict: Encompassing the Extremes and the In-Betweens
September 18, 2023
The Syria conflict has been described as the most socially mediated in history, with online social media playing a particularly important role. At the same time, the everchanging landscape of the conflict leads to difficulties in applying analytical approaches taken by other studies of online political activism. Therefore, in this paper, we use an approach ...
Social media and counterterrorism strategy
September 18, 2023
With the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the issue of domestic radicalisation has taken on renewed significance for Western democracies. In particular, attention has been drawn to the potency of ISIS engagement on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Several governments have emphasised the importance of online programs aimed at ...
Quantifying Salient Concepts Discussed in Social Media Content: A Case Study using Twitter Content Written by Radicalized Youth
September 18, 2023
Social Media has become an important source for information about people and real-world events. Its importance is driven largely by the enormous number of people generating and updating content in Social Media platforms. In this report, we measure the extent to which we can accurately measure the salience of topics/concepts that might be of interest ...