US President Barack Obama’s administration is revamping its effort to counter the Islamic State’s (IS) propaganda machine, acknowledging that the militant group has been far more effective in attracting new recruits, financing and global notoriety than the US and its allies have been in discrediting it.
At the heart of the plan is expanding a tiny US Department of State agency, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications, to harness all the existing attempts at countermessaging by much larger federal departments, including the Pentagon, US Department of Homeland Security and intelligence agencies.
The center would also coordinate and amplify similar messaging by foreign allies and nongovernment agencies, as well as prominent Muslim academics, community leaders and religious scholars who oppose the Islamic State, previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and may have more credibility with the group’s target audience of young men and women than the US government.
With the Islamic State and its supporters producing as many as 90,000 tweets and other social media responses every day, US officials acknowledge they have a tough job ahead to blunt the group’s digital momentum in the same way a US-led air campaign has slowed the Islamic State’s advances on the battlefield in Iraq and, to a lesser extent, in Syria.
“We’re getting beaten on volume, so the only way to compete is by aggregating, curating and amplifying existing content,” US Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Richard Stengel said by telephone on Monday.
Until now, he said, the efforts to counter the Islamic State have not been well coordinated.
Many of the plan’s details are still being worked out, but administration officials are expected to describe at least its broad outlines during a three-day series of meetings sponsored by the White House that began yesterday, designed to showcase efforts under way in the US and abroad to combat what authorities call violent extremism.
Senior administration officials on Monday described the conference, coming in the wake of extremist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen as a way to help communities counter the efforts of groups like the Islamic State or al-Qaeda.
Obama is to speak twice during the meetings, which are expected to draw local leaders from around the US and foreign ministers from more than 60 nations.
Created at the direction of Obama in 2011, the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications has coordinated countermessaging against extremist groups, mainly aligned with al-Qaeda, and devised ways to counter extremists’ narratives. It also employs digital outreach specialists fluent in Arabic, Urdu, Punjabi and Somali to counter propaganda and misinformation about the US on the Internet in real time.
The same analysts also post messages on English-language Web sites that militants use to recruit, raise money and promote their cause. The online messaging has aimed to create a competing narrative that strikes an emotional chord with potential militants weighing whether to join a violent extremist group.
One online image two years ago, for instance, showed photographs of three US men who traveled to Somalia and died there, including Omar Hammami, a young man from Alabama who became an infamous Muslim militant.
The accompanying message read: “They came for jihad, but were murdered by al-Shabaab.”
Another image showed a young man weeping over a coffin.
The message read: “How can slaughtering the innocent be the right path?”
Each of the online posts carried a warning: “Think again. Turn away.”
In June last year, Islamic State supporters warned fighters to beware of the center’s Twitter account and not to interact with it.
Stengel, a former managing editor of Time magazine, said the new campaign against the Islamic State would carry out strategies now routinely employed by many businesses and individuals to elevate their digital footprints, including retweeting news items or opinion articles, forwarding hypertext links and taking other steps to optimize content online.
It would use the Twitter accounts of more than 350 State Department accounts, combining embassies, consulates, media hubs, bureaus and individuals, as well as similar accounts operated by the Pentagon, Homeland Security Department and foreign allies.
The State Department used this approach in condemning the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris, Stengel said.
“These guys aren’t Buzzfeed; they’re not invincible in social media,” Stengel said.
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