US authorities and Internet giants are boosting attempts to counter the Islamic State (IS) group’s online propaganda, although it is unclear how effective these efforts are in hampering the extremists’ public-relations machine.
With calls to jihad and highly produced videos of Islamic State fighters in battle or killing captives, the group has long used the Internet and social media to recruit fighters for its so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria, and to incite individuals around the world to commit terrorist attacks.
To try to stop this, Internet giants such as Twitter and Facebook are working hard to shut down Muslim extremist accounts, although these often pop back up under new names.
“Twitter has publicly said they’ve taken down close to 200,000 handles. They’ve taken down way more than that,” US Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Undersecretary of State Richard Stengel said at a recent seminar aimed at countering the Islamic State’s “brand.”
“YouTube has taken down literally millions of videos. Facebook has hundreds of people who are working 24/7 to take down this noxious content,” added Stengel, who also was the former managing editor of Time magazine.
US efforts are being led by the US Department of State’s Global Engagement Center, which was overhauled this year and brought under the leadership of former US naval officer Michael Lumpkin.
The center “is not going to be focused on US messages with a government stamp on them, but rather amplifying moderate credible voices in the region and throughout civil society,” US Homeland Security Advisor Lisa Monaco said.
The US military’s Central Command — which oversees operations in the Middle East — is “actively engaged” on social media to counter Islamic State propaganda, Pentagon spokesman Major Adrian Rankine-Galloway said.
“The command has a robust online engagement program that harnesses the professional talents and expertise of both military members and contractors working together,” he said. “We operate using truthful information directed toward regional audiences to combat [Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant] ISIL’s lies and deception.”
Stenger said efforts are paying off.
“There’s now five times as much messaging on social media that is anti-ISIL than pro-ISIL, again, mostly in Arabic,” he said.
JM Berger, an expert on the Islamic State group, said they are feeling the squeeze.
“There is no question that ISIS supporters on Twitter and elsewhere are under tremendous pressure and they are performing significantly below the levels we saw last year, or even earlier this year,” he said, using another acronym for the Islamic State group.
“Supporter accounts have fewer followers and tweet less often. They are still able to distribute their propaganda to a shrinking core audience, but it is harder for them to broadcast widely and to get their message in front of potential recruits,” he said.
Brookings Institution Muslim militancy expert Will McCants said pressure on Facebook and Twitter has seen Islamic State supporters turn to smaller social media platforms such as Telegram to disseminate their propaganda.
“Still, they try to maintain a presence on the larger platforms because that’s where the potential recruits are,” he said.
Search for International Terrorist Entities Intelligence Group co-founder Rita Katz rejected the notion that Muslim extremist propaganda is slowing.
Islamic State propaganda “at least doubled last year if not even more. Further, in addition to the daily reports, in the last year the Islamic State has also increased substantially its publications, as it started several new ones,” she said, pointing to new Turkish and Russian-language magazines.
“These groups and individuals are still online and they’re still recruiting,” she said.
FBI Director James Comey said that while there has been a drop in people traveling to join the Islamic State group, the extremists retain the ability to “motivate troubled souls.”
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema