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This paper was presented at the 2nd European Counter Terrorism Centre (ECTC) Advisory Group conference, 17-18 April 2018, at Europol Headquarters, The Hague. The views expressed are the authors’ own and do not necessarily represent those of Europol.
In a speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2017, the U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May called on social media companies to do more to remove and block terrorist content from their platforms [1]. In the speech she stated that the average lifespan of online propaganda from the so-called Islamic State (IS) was 36 hours. For such content to be disrupted effectively, she claimed that this figure needed to be reduced to one to two hours. This has since come to be known as the ‘golden window’: if terrorist material can be detected and removed within one to two hours, its spread will be prevented.

The so-called Islamic State (IS) has a sophisticated media strategy (Winter 2017), an important part of which has been its English-language online magazine Dabiq. Launched in July 2014, a total of fifteen issues of Dabiq in the two years that followed. These issues were disseminated in a variety of ways, including archive sites (Bodo and Speckhard 2017), web forums and file-sharing networks (Gambhir 2016), the dark web (Stacey 2017), and even via an attempt to sell the freely available magazines for profit through the online retailer Amazon (Masi 2015). One of the most important forums for dissemination, however, was the social media platform Twitter (Bodo and Speckhard 2017; Gambhir 2016; Cunningham, Everton and Schroeder 2015; Shaheen 2015). Released in July 2016, the theme of Dabiq issue 15 was ‘Break the Cross’. After referring to a number of attacks that had occurred in the preceding weeks, the issue’s foreword called on ‘pagan Christians’, ‘liberalist secularists’ and ‘sceptical atheists’ to ‘recognize their Creator and submit to Him’. In addition to regular features, including ‘Among the believers are men’ and ‘In the words of the enemy’ (which, in this issue’ focussed on Pope Francis), and advertisements for other IS media, issue 15 contained an 18 page feature article, also titled ‘Break the Cross’. Arguing that the Bible does not display the three hallmarks of a true divine text, the article discusses the doctrine of the Trinity, whether Jesus was crucified, and whether Paul’s New Testament teachings are authentic (repeatedly stating that Paul was a known liar). It then seeks to establish the authenticity of the Prophet Muhammad, before asking Christians rhetorically: ‘O People of the Scripture, follow the truth from your Lord, whom you claim to love. Would you follow your parents and ancestors if you knew they were walking into a fire?’ and concluding ‘Know well that our fight will continue until you are defeated and submit to the rule of your Creator, or until we achieve martyrdom. Allah has made our mission to wage war against disbelief until it ceases to exist, as he has ordered us to kill all pagans wherever they are found’. Drawing on an original dataset, in this article we examine the response to the release of Dabiq issue 15 on Twitter. We examine the response in two respects: first, the response from Twitter itself, in terms of suspension activity; and, second, the response from other users, in terms of their engagement with posts disseminating the new issue. Before presenting our findings, we begin by offering an overview of our methodology.

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To inform the discussion, the paper draws on the debates that have surrounded the U.K. ‘Encouragement of Terrorism’ criminal offence. Created by the Terrorism Act 2006, and recently amended by the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019, this offence has proved controversial from its inception for two principal reasons. First, the offence expressly encompasses both direct and indirect encouragement. Critics have argued that the concept of indirect encouragement is too nebulous and gives the offence too wide a scope. Second, the framing of the offence focuses not on the purpose of the speaker, but on whether the potential effect of the statement is to encourage terrorism.

Images are known to have important effects on human perception and persuasion. Jihadist groups are also known to make strategic use of emotive imagery and symbolism for persuasive ends. Yet until recently studies of the online magazines published by violent jihadist groups largely focused on their textual, not their image, content and, while the image content of these magazines is now the subject of a burgeoning number of studies, few of these compare the images used by different groups. This article accordingly offers a cross-group comparison, examining the image content of a total of thirty-nine issues of five online magazines published by four different jihadist groups. Starting with a content analysis, it shows that the images’ most common focus is non-leader jihadis. Using a news values analysis, it then shows how these images of non-leader jihadis are used to visually construct the identity of a “good Muslim.” This construct is characterized by three traits, each corresponding to a different news value: fulfilled (personalization); active (consonance); and respected (prominence). Moreover, these traits are intertwined: fulfillment comes from responding actively to the call to violent jihad, which in turn promises respect. The article concludes by highlighting some subtle differences between how the news values of personalization, consonance, and prominence are realized in the different magazines, and by discussing the implications of the “good Muslim” construct for efforts to develop countermessages.

It is well established that jihadist groups and their supporters post URLs on online platforms to outlink to items of propaganda stored on other platforms. Industry initiatives – such as Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism’s inclusion of URLs in its hash-sharing database, and Tech Against Terrorism’s Terrorist Content Analytics Platform – have sought to counter this practice. These measures, together with new regulatory regimes (e.g. the EU’s Terrorist Content Online Regulation) and the growing use of decentralised services, raise the question whether jihadist groups’ propaganda dissemination strategies are perhaps being forced to evolve. This report considers whether there is evidence of such an evolution, by examining the means that three jihadist groups (Islamic State (IS), Al-Qaeda (AQ) and Al-Shabaab) used to disseminate their propaganda during a two-month period in early 2023.